Reconstructing Post-Nationalist Liberal Pluralism: From Interest to Identity

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Reconstructing Post-Nationalist Liberal Pluralism

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Reconstructing Post-Nationalist Liberal Pluralism From Interest to Identity

Katherine Smits

RECONSTRUCTING POST-NATIONALIST LIBERAL PLURALISM

© Katherine Smits, 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–7019–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smits, Katherine. Reconstructing post-nationalist liberal pluralism : from interest to identity / Katherine Smits. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7019–X 1. Group identity. 2. Pluralism (Social sciences). 3. Liberalism. I. Title. HM753.S58 2005 323.1—dc22

2005049190

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For my parents


C on t e n t s

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter One

Identity Politics and the Limits of Moral Pluralism

11

Class, Nation, and Character in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought

35

Interest Pluralisms and the Erasure of Social Identity

59

Chapter Four

Multicultural Liberalism

77

Chapter Five

Group Representation and Deliberative Liberalism

95

Cultural Recognition and the Claims of Muslim Immigrant Communities

113

Conclusion: Reconstructing Liberal Pluralism

135

Chapter Two Chapter Three

Chapter Six Chapter Seven Notes

149

Bibliography

181

Index

195


Acknowledgments

This book, finished in Auckland, New Zealand, grew out of a project begun several years ago in Ithaca, New York. I—and it—have led a peripatetic and much-interrupted existence since, but I am grateful to those at Cornell who, through their own work and example, sparked and encouraged a lasting enthusiasm for liberalism and pluralism, and with whom I discussed these ideas in their early stages: particularly Dia Anagnostou, Isaac Kramnick, Nancy Hirschmann, Chris Reus-Smit and Henry Shue. In Cincinnati, Kristin Dietsche, Susan Hilgendorf and Laura Smith, members of our feminist discussion group, overcame disciplinary boundaries, interested themselves in liberal philosophy and encouraged me to keep writing and thinking. I am also grateful to Heather and Wayne Hall, and Cheli Reutter in Cincinnati, who offered support, encouragement and sustenance— both intellectual and material. The Political Studies department at the University of Auckland has provided a congenial and collegial environment in which to at last complete this project. Thanks especially to Michael Mintrom and Jacqui True. The unavoidable anxieties of the last stages have been much reduced by Toby Wahl at Palgrave, and Nick Christiansen, who compiled the bibliography. Chapter two was first published in History of Political Thought XXV, 2 (Summer 2004), 298–324. An earlier version of chapter four was published in Polity XXXV, 3 (April 2003), 347–67. I owe more than I can express here to my husband, Marty Wechselblatt, who has read every word of this manuscript and has tried his best to help me to write a little less like a social scientist. Over many years, and in several countries, he has offered close and cogent criticism of the arguments advanced here, as well as encouragement, support, sympathy, and intellectual companionship. I could never have finished this book without him. I dedicate this book to my parents, with thanks for their patient support and encouragement over the long haul. Finally, I must thank my daughters, Julia and Sophie, who have, at least some of the time, played quietly while I worked, and who embody for me daily the wonderful potential for freedom and autonomy within our communities of fate.


Introduction

Since the 1960s, the rise of new social movements demanding justice and equality for those suffering discrimination on the grounds of sex, race, ethnicity, and sexuality has fundamentally changed the terms of political debate in liberal democracies. Questions concerning the relevance of identity, difference, and diversity to the public sphere of politics, as well as their implications for public policy, have over the last decade become central and divisive in both academic discourse and public debate.1 The language of identity and difference is used to legitimize a wide range of political claims; in fact, at the same time as affirmative action has come under attack in the United States and elsewhere, the language of group identity, originally deployed by historically subordinated minorities, has now been appropriated by more mainstream groups. In the late 1990s, popular culture portrayed the “angry white man,” allegedly oppressed and marginalized by organized groups of women and people of color, and out for revenge.2 At the other end of the political spectrum, scholars began at the same time to critically explore whiteness as a ground for identity. In the course of this debate over group identity, strong attacks have been launched against liberal philosophy as the dominant Anglo-American theoretical paradigm for politics. Charges that liberalism is at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to identity claims have been made notably not only by feminists and scholars of race and ethnicity, but also by liberalism’s internal critics. At the same time as liberalism has become the hegemonic ideology of the international political scene, critics have accused it of irrelevance and failure to speak to the most important political questions facing modern multicultural democracies. As one critic colorfully puts it: “Liberalism has become a universal Latin dialog which holds the monastic community of philosophers together as the barbarians swirl about the walls, but one which becomes more and more distant from the political vernacular.”3 In a controversial series of well-publicized attacks made in the 1990s, John Gray blamed the supposed irrelevance of liberal political philosophy on its wholesale adoption of the “legalistic” approach of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which attempts to prescribe an ideal system of just government based on

2 / post-nationalist liberal pluralism

first principles, with little concern for social realities.4 Liberalism, Gray concluded, has become a legal rather than a political philosophy, and has thus made itself irrelevant to actual politics.5 Many theorists have suggested abandoning, or at least moving beyond liberalism to a more radical democratic theory that embraces the politics of difference. This produced a range of attempts to theorize diversity and difference as a late- or postmodern phenomenon in itself. Poststructuralist theorists such as Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have proposed a radical democratic pluralism, in which the individual bearers of complex and relational identities struggle over politics in an agonistic public sphere.6 In answer to the questions she posed herself about the effect of the new social movements on political philosophy, Iris Marion Young has argued for the recognition of group identity through a politics of difference. In her most recent work, Young advocates the formalization of structural group representation in the deliberative democratic political process, to augment the individualist liberal model. She defends a system of group rights, to operate in tandem with individual rights.7 Some postmodernist political theorists have argued for the deconstruction of all identities—mainstream and marginal. Political agendas and intellectual work, they assert, should be refocused on local conditions and struggles, rather than seeking a grounding in theoretical meta-narratives like liberalism.8 Postmodernist and radical democratic critiques share with feminist and other identity politics theories a critique of the “atomism” or “abstract individualism” of liberalism. (They assume these qualities to be essential to the ontological basis of liberalism; I argue here that they represent one liberal tradition, and that an alternative liberal theory assumes the socially constructed and embedded subject.) Critics allege that liberal theory defines social groupings as either aggregates or voluntary associations, in which the individual is ontologically prior to the group and to all social relations.9 It further subsumes identity in individuality, rendering it irrelevant in the public or political realm, which is constructed by the contractual agreement of individuals.10 The ability to perform the act of willing consent, rather than identity, becomes the salient political characteristic of the person. Some liberals do indeed defend this position, reiterating that all groupings, including those that express aspects of deep identity, must be maintained as voluntary. According to one critique of collective rights, negative liberty and consent trump the expression of socially constructed individuality. Chandran Kukathas argues that the admission of group claims limits the freedom of individual group members and embroils the state in internecine conflicts.11 Some others explicitly reject any claims made by cultural groups, on the grounds of liberalism’s commitment to redistribution and

introduction / 3

egalitarianism. Brian Barry, for example, argues that the protection of cultures and group rights are measures that distract from the real problems of justice, defined in liberal terms as a more equal distribution of resources and status.12 Recently, however, several liberal theorists have attempted to accommodate liberalism to the political claims of pluralism. I examine these arguments in this book and find that the social pluralities they assume and address are based on ethical or moral views, interest groups, or minority national cultures, rather than on broad-based identity claims. While interest, moral views, and national membership are obviously important as sources of social pluralism, they do not, I shall argue, shape individual identity in the same way as identity group membership does, and they cannot adequately express the claims of identity groups for political recognition. My purpose here is to argue that a much broader recognition of identity claims is consistent with liberal principles, and in fact is implicit in the historical strain of liberal thought associated with John Stuart Mill. The fundamental question underlying my exploration of liberal theory’s attempts to accommodate pluralism concerns how and why theorists have based their defenses and proposed revisions of liberal pluralism upon particular and contestable definitions of just what is the relevant and significant plurality. To put it another way, how is it that interest, moral views, and national membership have come to be the officially sanctioned sources of social plurality? Having traced the process by which this occurs, I go on to defend a revised liberal pluralism that, as I show, accounts for the political significance of subnational identity group membership. The liberal perspective I advocate takes the fundamental social plurality to be that of identity groups, rather than of interests or ethical views. And in defining identity groups it rejects the assumption that national or ethnic cultural communities are necessarily the deepest sources of human social identity. This book thus comprises three interrelated parts: a critical analysis of the way liberal theory has developed since Mill, an argument for a reconstructed liberalism based on Mill’s pluralism, and finally, an examination of ways in which this reconstructed liberalism could better address policy issues concerning the claims of identity groups. We shall see that the relationship between interest and group membership, including national cultural membership, has been a complex one. The critical and alternative accounts of liberalism I develop here necessarily range broadly in scope, in terms of both the history of thought, and contemporary political applications. An essential aspect of my project here is to develop an alternative liberal political sociology, and for this reason, I begin by addressing the claims for recognition of social groups made by feminists and scholars of race, ethnicity, and sexuality, under the rubric of identity politics. In the model of


identity politics that I defend in chapter one, individuals belong to these groups not to express shared interests, but because they are assigned to them on the basis of socially marked characteristics that are historically contingent. Individual identity is constructed by group membership through intersubjective relations with both other group members and the wider social context. I distinguish here between essentializing theories of group identity and a more fluid and multilayered approach that recognizes the complex plurality of social group memberships. I then discuss the relationship between groups and cultures, and the significance of cultural context in the construction of identity. I examine the claim that nationality provides a unique cultural context for groups members, unlike other ascriptive groups, and hence deserves special consideration. In fact, all identity groups operate as cultural contexts for members, shaping individual identity and action, through which they reproduce themselves. I then explore the dominant contemporary liberal response to plurality among Anglo-American political philosophers. Several liberals have recognized the need to theorize principles of justice and legitimacy in the political context of diversity, but have responded by returning to the traditional liberal problem of moral and ethical plurality. Liberalism and moral pluralism have, of course, been interdependent since their shared origins in the secularization of the early modern period. The contractarian theorists of the early modern period as well as contemporary liberals all assume by definition that individuals recognize a plurality of goods. However, the selfdescribed “political liberals” I concentrate on in chapter one—the later John Rawls, Donald Moon, and Charles Larmore—are specifically concerned with constructing a legitimate liberal politics in the cultural context of diverse moral positions, all of which command significant social support.13 Contemporary pluralism has come to encompass the wider diversity of belief and worldview produced in Western democracies by globalization, the international movement of people, and the rights revolution that has followed from the demands of newly emergent social groups. In the practical context of social debate and conflict in Western democracies over issues such as the rights of women and minority groups, toleration of different social and cultural practices, and the value of multicultural education, moral pluralism suggests the promise of an enlightened liberalism, sensitive to difference and fit for diverse, multicultural societies. As I argue, however, political liberalism recognizes pluralism only by maintaining a strict separation between the private world of civil society and affective attachments, on one hand, and the public world of politics, on the other, where patriotism is the only recognizable group sentiment. As we shall see in later chapters, the moral pluralist conception of the self is as resolutely prepolitical as that which is deployed by social science pluralism.

introduction / 5

Personal identity in all its complexities is a private issue, politically significant only in terms of the different moral positions to which it gives rise. The inadequacy of moral pluralism as a response to group difference is grounded in liberal fears of determinism. These concerns are reflected in the model of autonomous agency presupposed by moral pluralists. I develop instead an alternative model of “weak autonomy,” which reflects both communitarian critques of liberal ontology and the imperatives of sociological pluralism. Contemporary liberal theorists of moral pluralism often claim as a precedent John Stuart Mill’s arguments for the toleration of a diversity of moral views. As I show in chapter two, however, Mill’s work also demonstrates the origins of identity pluralism. In fact, many of the problems that still beset contemporary pluralism, such as the tension between voluntarism and socialization, have their origins in nineteenth-century liberal thought, from Mill through his successors. In this chapter I explore early liberal attempts to account for and incorporate social constructedness into the liberal conception of the person and politics. It was during this period, as Rawls points out, that liberalism was reformulated by John Stuart Mill, de Tocqueville, and Constant for the context of the modern democratic state.14 The formation of mass, increasingly democratic and literate societies, with imperial links to other cultures brought different classes and social groups together into public space for the first time.15 The classification of social groups and investigation of the influences of social circumstances upon personality were central themes in nineteenth-century thought. They were incorporated into political theory by Mill in his ethology, in which he explored the influence of social circumstances upon personality and character—a favorite Victorian term denoting moral personality. At the same time, Romantic individuality imagined the individual as a self-making and self-choosing being, for whom life and character were created out of a series of choices. For nineteenth-century liberals, these two elements were both clearly present. But we can trace a shift in liberal thinking over this period concerning the question of which groups were significant. As I show, Mill believed that membership in the national community, and also in a range of social groups or classes within the nation, arrayed according to relative power, largely determined personality and interest. Identity was shaped by “national character” as well as class and social position. Later liberals, however, influenced by Idealist views of the state and emerging nationalist movements, assigned less significance to subnational groups, and more to national community. Subsequent liberal thought was to share the assumption that nationality not only constituted the social group context constituting identity, but that by doing so it guaranteed membership in a range of voluntary associations that then expressed individual identity.


In the late nineteenth century there is thus a mutually interdependent relationship between national membership and multiple interest, a relationship we will trace later in the social scientific pluralism of Robert Dahl. But the development of liberal interest pluralism is a complicated story, the trajectory of which I trace in chapter three. The early-twentieth-century British pluralists Laski and Cole developed a theory of interest pluralism, which minimizes the role of national community and focuses on the range of voluntary associations that express human interests. At this point, interest became the dominant basis for pluralism in liberal thought. (In their later work, however, Laski and Cole recognized that certain types of groups, particularly social classes, shape personality in the same way that national membership does. It was increasing recognition of the importance of these groups, and the power structures in which they are embedded, that led them away from interest pluralism.) Having traced the emergence of interest and the effacement of identity pluralism in liberal thought, I next examine the two main directions in which twentieth-century liberal thought took the question of pluralism. As I show, while the early pluralists had dismissed any special place for national membership in shaping the individual, later interest pluralists recovered national membership as the basis for interest groups. I begin by considering social science pluralism, moving then to associationalist theories that build upon interest pluralism to argue for the devolution of political life into voluntary, interest-based communities. From the standpoint of the politics of identity, liberal pluralism, as it has dominated American political science since the work of Robert Dahl and others in the 1960s, is in fact another version of the depoliticization of identity effected by moral pluralists, this time with a materialist rather than an idealist focus. Pluralism in the empirical political theory of American political science has referred primarily to the existence of interest groups, and the role these groups play in competing to capture political power and to influence policy making.16 As I discuss in detail in chapter three, empirical pluralists in this school of thought (which has its origins in Tocqueville’s discussion of associations) define groups as voluntary and representative of interests. These interests are possessed by a pre-given individual, who exists prior to analysis and remains fixed, even though the interests he or she possesses may vary infinitely. The individual in this sense, prior to his or her interests, is unexplained and untheorized. This poses a problem both logically and politically: the individual possessing interests must be composed of some content other than interests, or else it would be presumed to change whenever its interests changed. And if it does have content, pluralists must defend their assumption that such content is not relevant to politics. Hirst’s argument, an early liberal intervention in the current discourse on the revitalization of civil society, calls for the decentralization of

introduction / 7

governance and the devolution of political and economic power to a network of voluntary associations.17 The role of the state would be simply to fund and protect these institutions if necessary. While Hirst envisages many local associations as mirroring recently emerged social movements, he rejects any constituting role these might play in individual identity, emphasizing their voluntary nature. While for Hirst, groups become the vehicles for direct democratic governance, they remain in nature the same as Dahl’s interest groups—subject to the same critique of the separation of interests from identity. In chapter four I turn from interest pluralism back to national cultural membership—the backdrop for interest pluralism, but the central story for recent “culturalist” liberals. Will Kymlicka, Yael Tamir, and Charles Taylor reject the interest-based model of the person, and reclaim the role of national community in the construction of personal identity. For these theorists, however, minority national cultural communities are the focus of pluralism. Although these theorists base their claims on quite different grounds, all argue that the state should recognize cultural survival as a collective good, on the grounds that it is necessary for individual autonomy. Thus the state would distinguish between fundamental rights, which apply equally to all citizens, and group-specific rights designed to ensure their survival. In chapter four, I examine Will Kymlicka’s claims for the legal protection of indigenous minorities, Tamir’s defense of national minority self-determination, and Taylor’s argument for recognition.18 As I show, all three arguments are premised on a fundamental distinction between the roles of national and subnational groups in the construction of individual identity. Subnational groups are described as associations of interest or lifestyle. I contend that no such distinction can be maintained and that claims to the special status of national groups assume their homogeneity, and thus privilege the meaning of group identity as interpreted by dominant subgroups within the national community. Identity is in fact constructed out of the intersection between several group memberships. The privileging of the national culture reinforces the effacement of subnational groups, particularly those that coalesce around gender, sexuality, class, and religion. “Cultural liberal” arguments, like those of earlier Idealist liberals, rest upon the exceptional and determining status of the national community. National membership shapes identity in a way that “subcultural” groups cannot. Having outlined identity claims, and traced the historical development of liberal pluralism in its various forms in the first four chapters of this book, in the final two, I turn to contemporary issues and applications. Chapter five examines the relevance of identity pluralism to liberal thinking about democratic theory and representation, and chapter six discusses the specific case of


Muslim minorities in Western states. I begin in chapter five from the perspective of recent deliberative democratic theory, which predicates the democratic legitimacy of political decisions upon the fact that they are reached after full and fair deliberation upon them by all involved. Deliberative democracy builds upon the claims of identity politics that groups be heard in the political process; as a democratic paradigm, it owes its appeal to the fact that it attempts to reconcile the speech claims of identity politics with a communitarian-inspired commitment to democratic community. Rational exchange directed toward persuasion becomes the means through which otherwise unbridgeable difference is negotiated. As critics like Iris Young have pointed out, however, deliberative democracy emphasizes rational speech, rather than the expressive and communicative dimensions of interchange.19 This chapter argues that the recognition or greeting of groups as full participants in the deliberative process is a necessary precondition to full individual participation in deliberation. Real access to the deliberative process must be extended to interested groups, with rights of self-representation. Moreover, the plurality of groups to which individuals belong must be recognized, as must the multiple spheres of deliberative activity. I defend a liberal model of group representation that recognizes the internal contestation of group identity, and multiple membership. It calls for a pragmatic and issue-specific approach to deliberation, which avoids the fixing of collective identities and the scheduling of legitimate groups. I argue that a flexible and case-by-case approach is preferable to differentiated citizenship models, which run the risk of permanently defining the identities of collectivities, underplaying the importance of exit, and limiting the range of groups who might wish to participate in deliberation. In chapter six, I examine the claims of Muslims for public recognition in Western states, particularly the United States, Britain, and Canada. I trace shifts in self-description and understanding within Muslim groups in these countries since the 1980s, and the changes in public attitudes toward these groups that have been produced by this shift, and which continue to reinforce it. In all of these cases, Muslims have emerged in this period as a distinct religious cultural community, separate from the various ethnic communities to which adherents belong. In some cases, as I show, states have been slow to recognize this, and to afford Muslims recognition as a group. The ethnic cultural community paradigm fails to account for this fundamental shift in group identification. One of the further effects of this failure is to characterize Muslims as a group sharing particular (and allegedly anti-Western and antidemocratic) views and beliefs, a mischaracterization that strengthened after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This misunderstanding has been particularly problematic in the case of France and the wearing of the Muslim veil in schools. I examine the issue

introduction / 9

of the veil in France, as well as the United States, Britain, and Canada, to trace the dual process by which Muslim group identification has come to distinguish itself from both ethnic identity and moral position. Radical democratic and postmodernist approaches to pluralism have developed because the standard liberal theories have proven unsatisfactory in various ways. But as I conclude, there are important traditions in liberal thought upon which we can build to argue for the recognition and politicization of group identity. The nineteenth-century liberal concern with the balance between self-authorship and social constructedness suggests a basis for recognizing the construction of identity by groups, while rejecting determinism and maintaining the importance of individual assertion. However the later nineteenth-century liberal preoccupation with national membership led theorists to an Idealist politics that ignored power struggles and social movements within national communities. In the same way, the new culturalist liberal focus on national membership is theoretically unsupportable and politically insensitive to the pluralist claims of nonnational groups. In arguing here for a postnationalist liberal pluralism, I contend that liberal thinking must sever the link between social constructedness and national identity reinforced in the late nineteenth century. Critics have often misunderstood these links, because nineteenth-century liberals tended to be suspicious of the more Romantic and mystical claims of nationalists. In his recent and influential On Nationality, David Miller argues that from the nineteenth century, liberals have seen nationalism as fundamentally illiberal, a primitive social phenomena, antithetical to rational and civilized social behavior.20 As I point out in chapter two, while Victorian liberals were sometimes uncomfortable with particular nationalist movements, they supported the principle of national self-determination. But what concerns me here is less their explicit political support than the role that national membership plays in their (and later liberals’) views of the relationship between a given political community and a chosen political association. Miller sees a contradiction between Mill, whose views clearly are consistent with a defense of nationality, and other liberals.21 As I argue here, however, rather than rejecting national identity, later liberals assumed national membership as the only form of identity-constructing community, and instead rejected class, race, and gender. Moreover, Miller argues that identity politics claims (cultural pluralism as he describes it) are based on the assumption that national identity is not one of a number of sources of affiliation and allegiance, but rather is suspect, and likely to be the product of political manipulation.22 While this may be true of some identity politics claims, it is not an accurate description of the work of multiculturalist liberals, who, as I argue in chapter three, in


fact assume a national model for all significant identity groups.23 In fact, liberalism’s problem with identity politics is a result of adherence to Miller’s principle of nationality, not the rejection of it. It should be noted that the liberal identity politics I defend here does not purport to solve all the problems of economic inequality that confront minority and marginalized groups. Many theorists who have addressed the problems I deal with here have attempted to reconcile arguments for representation with those for redistribution.24 My concern here is to defend the right of group members to voice: the right to express their social membership in political discourse. That in itself is empowering, and increases the likelihood that economic inequalities will be seriously and publicly addressed. But it does not imply any particular approach to redistribution, although it is not inconsistent with any that is developed with the full participation of those groups affected, as we shall see in the context of group representation in chapter five. Finally, it would be quite anachronistic to argue for the simple application of, for example, Mill’s analysis of class or race to contemporary identity politics. What contemporary theory can do, however, is recover and build on older and submerged strands in philosophical thinking to shift emphases, and to recognize different questions and different ways of approaching them. It is within these constraints that I show here how concern for and recognition of the importance of social membership have been a part of the developing liberal tradition. Their recovery can enable liberals to respond sensitively, but also critically, to the pressing claims of identity groups.

C h ap t e r O n e Identity Politics and the Limits of Moral Pluralism

Identity groups define the essentials of group membership in different ways, not surprisingly, depending on the exigencies of their social situations. Such definitions also change over time, as a group’s social standing comes under new and different pressures relative to other groups. In many cases, groups that emerged with strong claims of shared and deep identity, go on to complicate and qualify their claims to such an extent that some internal critics worry aloud that the claim of commonality has ceased to be meaningful. Feminism offers a good example of this: when the second-wave women’s movement began, feminists argued that women shared a fundamental identity based on sex. Women of color and lesbians first challenged this essential commonality on political grounds; postmodernist feminists have since deconstructed it philosophically. The political claims identity groups make and the bases for them have also differed, depending upon whether groups represent race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, or sexuality (to list some common but hardly nonexhaustive social cleavages). The variations here turn on the impact of membership upon individuals, and the degree of public recognition they seek. Some identity groups claim a determining relationship between group membership and individual identity; some a looser and more complex connection. Some have demanded political autonomy; some, recognition in existing political institutions, such as guaranteed seats in parliament; some, the inclusion of group history and culture in educational curricula. Because my purpose here is to argue for a liberalism based on identity pluralism, I defend a particular version of group claim which does not, admittedly, encompass all the kinds of political claims identity groups have made. As we shall see, this model assumes a constructing, but not a determining relationship between group membership and individual identity. This is in large part because of the complexity and multiplicity of group membership that my model assumes. My model includes groups along a


range of social axes, although the kinds of political claims made by, say a gender group, may differ from those made by an indigenous minority. Theorists have drawn fine lines and distinctions between the various kinds of identity groups. Cultural liberals, for example, differentiate clearly between national and subnational groups in their justification of group autonomy. Amy Gutmann distinguishes four kinds of identity groups: cultural, voluntary, ascriptive, and religious.1 I argue however, that all identity groups are founded upon ascription and culture, and that such groups are fundamentally distinct from voluntary associations, interest groups, and varieties of association based on like-mindedness. Ascription identifies the social markers that divide groups, independently of individual intent and belief. Culture forms the link between the group and individual identity which, as we shall see, justifies liberal recognition. There are, of course, important overlaps between identity, interest, and morality groups, but identity groups have frequently been mischaracterized as interest or morality groups, and their claims to recognition have consequently been missed. Where cultural groups have been recognized, they have also been limited to national cultures, thus missing the ways in which subnational group cultures shape individual identity. I begin this chapter by discussing the various kinds of identity groups, the ways in which they describe the relationship between individual member and the group, and the political claims they make. I examine the status of national versus subnational groups, concluding that both kinds of groups play a role in constructing the identity of members. Liberals have responded to the claims of identity groups largely by assuming that these claims are diverse moral arguments, rather than demands for status or recognition. In the second section that follows I discuss moral pluralism in the work of three “political liberals” as a response to the claims of these groups, and the reasons why it has proven inadequate. The critique of liberal moral pluralism raises questions of determinism and free agency, and finally I examine liberal and communitarian approaches to social constructedness and autonomy. I conclude that multiple identity group membership suggests a third approach, in which a range of social group affiliations provide the grounds for second-order reflection upon individual goals. Membership, Ascription and the Construction of Identity Demands for rights and for freedoms from oppression and discrimination by persons identifying as members of social groups are of course nothing new in the history of liberal democracies. During the nineteenth century, class and religious groups, as well as first-wave feminists achieved political and civil rights for their members through the aggressive pursuit of such

identity politics and moral pluralism / 13

claims. The emergence of the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s has focused attention not only on demands for individual rights, but on the meanings, both ascribed and self-defined, of membership in social groups. By social groups I mean here not the voluntary associations and societies of interest pluralism (which I refer to as associations) but groups out of which it is impossible or very difficult to exit, into which one is born or assigned by prevailing ideology, social beliefs, and institutions.2 I discuss interest groups in more detail in chapter three, but it’s important to define the difference between them and identity groups here. Interest groups unite people with existing and common concerns and are, as Gutmann comments, instrumental in their purpose.3 Because membership in associations is voluntary, these groups are understood to have no existence distinct from that of the individuals who comprise them. Thus there exists no reciprocal, mutually constituting relationship between group and member. The key difference between interest and identity groups is that membership in the latter does not simply aim to fulfill preexisting interests, rather, it both expresses and shapes an important aspect of individual identity.4 There is a tendency to talk about some such groups as though they were natural or biological, particularly in the case of race. Yet, as Anthony Appiah has pointed out, these groups are based less upon scientifically verifiable distinctions than upon prevailing ideas about the meaning of biological distinctions.5 The division between the sexes has a biological basis (if one occasionally contested at the margins) but “men” and “women” are categories imbued with social as well as biological meanings. Some social groups, notably classes, are the product of economic structures. Sometimes the process of marking is tautological: groups are identified essentially to rationalize those who share particular social practices, and then further practices are presumed to follow from group membership. The important point to note here is that such groups have no necessary existence before they are identified as such; marking a group brings it into existence, and allows individuals to identify with it.6 Because social groups are relationally constructed, they form along a range of historically contingent axes, depending upon which characteristics are marked within a given period. Thus gays and lesbians as groups did not exist until the late nineteenth century, when homosexual acts acquired social and political significance, largely as a result of medical and psychoanalytic categorization. Once a group was designated by the medical establishment, people were both assigned to it and identified themselves as members.7 These groups share in common a conception of membership that is not, in most cases, freely chosen. They are also, importantly, relational: they are defined as different from, or in opposition to, other groups, although


members of different groups may be presumed to share some broader group membership, such as citizenship. And they are not exclusive—as many groups may exist as differences are marked, and one person will be categorized into many groups. As Young summarizes, a social group is a “collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices or ways of life.”8 And whatever the origin of designation of the group, what is held to give members their identity as members are the social and cultural practices alleged to follow from their shared membership. This sense of shared identity is key to the formation or emergence of the social group as a political claimant. While membership and identity may historically have been designated by the dominant social group, the politics of identity arises as members of groups claim the right to determine and celebrate their own identities. The histories of oppressed groups have been those of identities explicitly imposed and defined as inferior. One response to this by the subjects of discrimination has been to claim for themselves the status of the liberal universal subject, the tactic taken by liberal feminists since Mary Wollstonecraft. An alternative strategy has been for members of oppressed groups, in the process of coming to recognize the imposed character of their identities, to accept their particularity, but then to redefine themselves by reinterpreting or revalorizing their particular imputed characteristics (and even derogatory names). This has been the approach of cultural feminists and standpoint feminists, who explore social relations and practices from the point of view of women and their experiences. The effect of this is to present a more positive version of women’s cultural identity (or increasingly, identities, as the subject group “women” becomes more fragmented). Emphasis is here placed on women’s claimed orientation toward pacifism, or on their distinctive patterns of moral reasoning.9 There is a voluminous literature treating the various identity groups in Western pluralist democracies, and here I only summarize briefly the ways in which they have reclaimed their identities in positive terms. The long history of African Americans’ cultural self-determination is manifested in music and literature as well as politics, from the Harlem Renaissance to the “black is beautiful” slogan of the Black Power movement, and the black separatism of the 1970s, to current interest in African culture and Afrocentrism. For the most part, this assertion of “racial identity”10 has involved a rejection of the argument that race has a biological basis, and that social behavior and character follow from biological distinctions. W.E.B. DuBois regarded any physical “racial bond” as unimportant, emphasizing the “social heritage of slavery” that joined together African Americans.11 The construction of a positive black identity results from the continual process of opposition to the negative stereotypes applied to African Americans as a group by whites. Gays and lesbians developed a self-defined and positive sense of group


identity during the 1970s, in reaction to years of negative stereotyping that culminated symbolically in the Stonewall riots.12 The use of the term “lesbian nation” during the 1970s suggests that politically conscious lesbians identified as strongly as members of their specific community and culture as they did with their nation-state. Stephen Cornell’s description of the way in which Native Americans came to develop a positive sense of their own identity, once they had been designated as a single group by whites, applies to all emerging social identity groups: The agents of collective action are not given to the world; they are made by it. Through the unfolding of incorporative processes . . . groups of people come to occupy common positions within a particular social order and to share distinctive interests or historical experience. As an outcome of that process, and of the clash of ideas attendant upon it, they also come to see themselves and their world in particular ways and consequently, to act on specific bases . . .13

It’s important to note that here again, racial identity is constructed not on the basis of biology, but of history; the shared characteristics of group members are understood as consequences of the circumstances in which group members historically have been placed. The emergence of many new social movements and groups has made it clear that their boundaries cannot be simply or finally defined. Most groups have been subject to internal division almost from their moment of origin. This has been a particularly vexed issue for feminism, as nonwhite, nonheterosexual, and working-class women have questioned the subsuming of difference on the basis of race, sexuality, and class, among other articulations, into the general category “women.” The developing plethora of groupings has, nevertheless, only fueled identity claims. As groups split off, they have continued to deploy the language of identity, calling for recognition for themselves and for the specific ways in which their members are discriminated against on the basis of membership. While liberal feminists are correct in claiming, as Susan Wolf does, that there is no clear “separate cultural heritage by which to redefine and reinterpret what it is to have an identity as a woman,”14 there do exist a range of cultural heritages each of which define one’s identity as a “woman” in different ways. As psychologists studying personal identity formation have demonstrated, the social categorization of individuals into groups leads to the formation of “psychological groups” whose members share forms of behavior, attitudes, and biases.15 Theorists of identity politics emphasize, like Kymlicka, the ways in which groups provide loose norms or models of behavior—narrative scripts in which members make sense of their experience and decide how to behave.16 This follows from the fact that people’s


actions are conceptually shaped: what we are able to do depends upon the concepts available to us.17 Groups describe roles in which members can “find themselves,” explain and justify their attitudes, behaviors, and social practices. Thus they enable identification, as Appiah puts it: “the process through which an individual consciously shapes her projects—including her plans for her own life and her conception of the good—by reference to available labels, available identities.”18 Because social groups are relationally constructed, they form along a range of historically contingent axes, depending upon which characteristics are marked in a given period. In contemporary liberal democracies, these include race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and regional location. One person may thus be grouped in several categories, and this sociological plurality is mirrored in the plurality of a given human subject. Membership in a crosscutting range of social groups plays a significant role in constructing individual identity. It follows from this that no one group can fully express or shape individual identity. Identity groups are formed as a result of social ascription and marking, but once formed, they function as cultural communities that reproduce themselves in their members, in the way Appiah describes. Many political theorists, particularly the new cultural liberals, reject the argument that identity groups are necessarily cultures. They contend that a culture must provide an all-encompassing context for human life and choices, and that nationality, or occasionally ethnicity, are the only kinds of identity group that function this way.19 I argue in detail against this restrictive definition of culture in chapter four; here I note only some of the features of the cultural community that identity groups possess. Many such groups other than nationalities define themselves in these terms on the basis of shared history and practices. A distinct language is not required, although the presence of one may explain why, for example, many deaf people understand themselves to be members of a distinct cultural group and engage in collective political activism. Nor must all cultural practices be shared, contrary to what Appiah calls “cultural geneticism.” A particular individual may not have access to all aspects of a culture that are marked as belonging to his or her group.20 It is true to say, as cultural liberals do, that nonnational identity groups do not constitute communities or cultures in an overarching or all-inclusive sense. Because each person belongs to several socially marked groups, no single one can wholly shape identity. For one thing, some people, such as those of mixed racial heritage, or bisexuals, may be ascribed to separate and mutually exclusive groups. As I argue in chapter four, however, national minorities also fail to qualify as overarching or all-encompassing cultures. To insist that a culture must be all-encompassing is to miss the complexity


of social identity construction.21 It is also to assume that cultural communities are homogeneous. Rather, as Shane Phelan argues, one of the key processes in which groups engage involves functioning as sites for the renegotiation of membership standards, when they experience internal conflict.22 Further, cultures are not constructed independently of each other, but in dialogical relation to each other. Appiah points out that African American culture(s) cannot be understood without reference to other American racial groups,23 and Toni Morrison has argued that dominant, white American culture has been shaped by its relation to black culture.24 In order for cultures to be distinct, they do not have to be entirely separate. Some liberals might worry at this point that I am sketching a view of personality as determined by membership in a particular group. And this is often the view that dominant groups take of minorities. As Andrew Hacker writes, “In the eyes of white Americans, being black encapsulates your identity. No other racial or national origin is seen as having so pervasive a personality or character.”25 In fact, group membership in itself cannot entirely determine identity, nor is that claim a necessary part of identity politics. Even apart from genetics, personal and familial experiences and circumstances vary, and identity also has a personal dimension. Appiah suggests that every person’s individual identity be seen as being composed of two dimensions: the collective dimension—the intersection of their collective identities—and the personal dimension, consisting of characteristics such as intelligence, wit, cupidity, charm.26 Moreover—and more importantly for my argument—people can choose themselves to assert or deny their assigned group identity. While ascription as a group member happens independently of that member’s will, identification with that group need not be automatic. A gay black man may choose to identify as black, rather than gay, a successful white businesswoman may refuse to identify herself with women. Both our multiple group memberships and those personal characteristics derived from upbringing and circumstance offer competing sources for our self-construction, and identification will be contingent upon context. I will have more to say about the importance of choosing to assert group identity when I discuss the relationship between communities of ascription and those of choice. The agendas and claims of groups vary, of course, but all demand public recognition of the collective worth of members, as well as the specificity of their experiences and historical identities. Recognition of worth, they argue, is essential to the self-respect of persons as group members. In an influential essay on multiculturalism in liberal democracies, Charles Taylor describes the way in which group demands for recognition are premised on the dialogical or intersubjective construction of identity, which renders it dependent


upon the attitudes of others: The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the mis-recognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage . . . if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted and reduced mode of being.27

This entails what Taylor admits to be an apparent paradox: in order for the authentic identity of individuals to be recognized, a crucial part (and we know that it must be crucial to those claiming it, because it has been asserted and owned as such) of that individual identity, that is, group identity, must also be recognized. For subordinated groups, recognition must necessarily be accompanied by fair treatment. Group members claim that they have been oppressed not as individuals, but as group members. They argue further, against liberal individualists, that laws and principles of justice which only recognize individuals necessarily exclude their own differentiated experience. Nondiscrimination may thus, as Taylor points out, require treating members of specific groups differently.28 Feminists contend, for example, that the specific bodily experiences of some women, particularly pregnancy, mean that they cannot be treated fairly under the law as “the same as men.”29 The reasoning behind affirmative action is that persons should be regarded, for specific purposes, as members of historically excluded groups, and should (all other things being equal) receive preferences to redress the historical wrongs done to those groups (rather than to them as individuals). Their recognition as group members is because they have been treated that way already. In short, the politics of identity requires that rights be attached to persons, not collectivities, but to persons as members of publicly recognized collectivities and bearers of publicly recognized social identities. From this perspective, the problem of illiberal groups, often a difficulty for liberal cultural pluralism, is easily resolved. As rights attach to persons, collectivities cannot claim any rights as against their members, should their members reject their rules or practices. In any case, internal criticism of cultural groups is often interpreted as individual dissent rather than (more accurately) as the contestation of cultural meanings. I discuss this in more detail in chapter four. Because the view of culture I adopt here does not assume it to be an overarching context that fundamentally determines all our choices, the liberal pluralism I advocate treats all identity groups as making similar claims to recognition and inclusion in the public sphere. The differences between national minorities and other identity groups have been overstated, as I argue in more detail in chapter four. Groups merit inclusion and recognition


because they shape the identities of their members, whether they express nationality, gender, sexuality, religion, or in fact any social cleavage.30 I do not focus on demands by national minorities for autonomy here because I do not think they can be supported on the grounds that only such groups are cultural communities, and that the definition of cultural community is that it provides an all-encompassing context. Other grounds may exist for granting autonomy to national minorities, but they do not include any unique cultural status assigned to national groups. The version of identity politics I have sketched here is clearly not essentialist. It recognizes that group identity is historically constructed, relational, and nondetermining. This is not to say that none of the claims made on behalf of identity politics are essentialist, but rather that such claims can easily be rejected by liberals on the grounds that they preclude individual freedom, autonomy, and self-determination. The case for identity politics that I have made does not appear to be prima facie antithetical to liberal principles, and I examine next the adequacy of liberal moral pluralism as a response to these claims. Liberal Theory and Moral Pluralism Moral pluralism refers to the fact of a diversity of moral positions held by members of a society, the existence of which must be accommodated by legitimate government. In contrast to social science pluralism, the central plurality is of chosen moral positions or worldviews, rather than of interests. Liberalism and moral pluralism are historically intertwined: the early modern origins of liberal political philosophy lie in the existence of a diversity of religious beliefs, and in Locke’s arguments for toleration.31 Over the past century, moreover, those links have been consolidated by liberals’ concern to present an “open” alternative to the utopian social and political theory of Marxism.32 But the most recent impetus to liberal theory to engage with moral pluralism has come from the claims of identity groups and minorities. This version of pluralism is, as we shall see, compatible with the existence of a range of groups and associations.33 But liberal moral pluralists assume the plurality of groups to be a nonpolitical matter, significant only because of the plurality of moral beliefs (conceptions of the good) to which it gives rise. We shall see this demonstrated in the “political liberalism”34 of Rawls, Moon, and Larmore. The obvious question posed by the claims of identity politics for liberals in the moral pluralist tradition concerns the relationship between moral views and social membership. As we shall see in the work of Rawls, Moon, and Larmore, liberal pluralists do accept that moral beliefs and positions are related to each person’s social context and familial and social group affiliations. Few


now deny, in the face of the communitarian critique of the 1970s and 1980s, that individuals are embedded in a system of social relations, and that identity is at least influenced by social context, including membership in socially recognized groups and classes. However, for political liberals, the social contexts and relations that construct identity are regarded as significant only in so far as they give rise to values, and it is the plurality of values rather than of identity-producing groups or communities that underlies liberal argument. This separation between a plurality of groups and a plurality of values gives rise to two interrelated problems. First, it produces a politics of ideas or beliefs, rather than a politics of presence.35 This cannot account for the exclusion of demands for recognition, which are crucial to the claims of identity politics, from the political debate. The focus on belief allows liberal moral pluralists to maintain the separation between political and nonpolitical spheres, and to confine issues surrounding identity to the latter. Identity remains a private and nonpolitical matter. The political is constituted and brought into being by the overlapping consensus on, or basic common denominator of beliefs that exist in social life. Because identity is politically legible and relevant only in terms of the moral positions to which it gives rise, it is the confluence of values, rather than a common identity that constitutes the political sphere and legitimizes political activity—the struggle over principles governing rights, obligations and the distribution of resources—to take place. Identity remains a nonpolitical matter, and political debate becomes the quest to seek consensus between different moral positions rather than a process that includes struggle for the recognition and just treatment of subordinated identity groups. In the political realm, citizens are understood as the possessors or holders of beliefs, rather than those who bear identities culturally inscribed either on their bodies or in their social practices. What they are is fundamentally the same and interchangeable, it is just their moral views that differ. This assumption of fundamental similarity, in the political sphere at least, is crucial because it allows liberal moral pluralists to contend that people divided only on their moral beliefs will be able, by rational debate and agreement, to reach a modus vivendi together. Moral beliefs may readily be expressed verbally, and unlike specific experiences are communicable and comprehensible even to those who disagree with them. There can be no guarantee of rational discussion about the personal and experiential content of identity, which therefore must be confined to the nonpolitical sphere. And even here, for political liberals, group membership plays an ambiguous role, as alternately unchosen and constituting on the one hand, and expressive of the free exercise of will and interests on the other.


The second and more fundamental problem with liberal moral pluralism is that it represses the complex socially constructed nature of persons in its focus on voluntarily held belief. While liberals accept that beliefs are influenced by networks of social relations and the communities of fate to which individuals are ascribed, the defining characteristic of the person as that of autonomous agent is nevertheless the ability to freely choose one’s ends and to act to advance them. Moral beliefs are understood to be freely held as a matter of definition; since Locke, liberals have argued for toleration on the grounds that true belief cannot be compelled.36 The free choice of ends, central to autonomy, is guaranteed by the essential voluntarism of moral belief. Communitarian theory has attempted to remedy both these problems. Communitarians have pointed (not without contradiction37) to both the unreality and moral undesirability of a pre-social, purely voluntarist self.38 They argue that subjects are thickly constituted by community membership, and cannot be separated into thick and thin selves. Thus socially constituted identity is not confined to a private sphere. In the political, citizens’ identities as members of their national society (or republic in fact, as these arguments are the most recent form of civic republicanism) must take precedence over other, private aspects of their identities.39 But communitarians only draw the borders between political/public and nonpolitical/private a little wider than do liberals. National communities are admitted to the political, but all subnational groups are relegated to the private. Communitarians assume that affiliation with such groups does not construct identity in the same way that national membership does, and that such group affiliation is a private and voluntary matter. While the liberal/communitarian debate has redirected attention to the social construction of identity, it has resulted in the meaning of social construction being confined to a presumably homogeneous national community. Both liberals and communitarians have largely ignored the complexity and conflict involved in the social construction of individual identity. The politics of identity focuses on the central question of ontology, which divides the two schools of thought.40 It suggests that identity is constituted by many and diverse social affiliations, by membership in a range of socially marked groupings defined in relation to other groups. Because of this, identity politics is able to focus on what some critics have described as sociological issues41—the actual political demands of social groups—rather than constructing an idealist model of politics based upon agreed first principles. I have already referred to the inadequacies of much current liberalism in that, as John Gray observes, it is a legalist rather than a political theory.42 Communitarian theory also often fails to acknowledge the contested and conflicted nature of political issues.43 What underlies the failures of both


liberals and communitarians to adequately describe the social construction of identity are the unsatisfactory conceptions of autonomous agency upon which each relies. I examine this problem in more detail and suggest a revised liberal conception of autonomy in what follows. Having outlined some problems with liberal moral pluralism in general terms, I want now to examine them more specifically in the political liberalism of Rawls, Moon, and Larmore. All share Berlin’s view that the state and political decision-making must remain neutral toward competing conceptions of the good.44 These are not of course the only theories in which moral pluralism is central. In his quite different argument for personal autonomy as the essential liberal value, for example, Joseph Raz notes that autonomy supports moral pluralism, because it requires choice between morally acceptable options, which command different reasons for validity.45 I focus upon the three theorists mentioned earlier because all have explicitly claimed that their models are designed to take full account of the existence of moral pluralism in contemporary liberal democracies, and to develop a political theory that stands alone in the context of diversity.46 Moral pluralism is the justification for Rawls’s theory of justice as “political, not metaphysical.”47 In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argued that the principles of justice were those that would be accepted by persons reasoning without (or as if they were without) any knowledge of their particular identity and social position.48 In his later work, however, Rawls moved away from the view that any comprehensive moral or philosophical conception of justice, however procedurally grounded, can be accepted in democratic societies that are “characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical and moral doctrines, but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines.”49 Moral pluralism is neither a contingent nor avoidable feature of democratic culture, against which a single comprehensive conception of justice may be urged; nor, importantly, does it reflect self or class interests that might or should be overcome. It follows rather from the incompatibility and incommensurability of values and ends to which Berlin refers. As a social fact, it is the normal result of the exercise of free human reason in the context of the free institutions of a constitutional democracy.50 The problem for political theory is to formulate a way in which groups of people believing in a range of deeply opposed comprehensive doctrines can live together in a stable and just society. Rawls argues that because of inescapable moral pluralism, an acceptable conception of justice cannot reflect any one comprehensive view of the good, but must be able to command the support of all reasonable views, in an “overlapping consensus.”51 All reasonable views will, by definition, understand society to be a fair system of cooperation.52 Because this conception of justice rests upon not one


view of the good, but rather on what can be accepted according to all (reasonable) viewpoints, it is political, rather than metaphysical.53 The principles of justice that regulate the basic structure of society are to be determined by a procedure involving rational agents subject to reasonable conditions. Rawls deliberately avoids describing a complete ontology; political liberalism requires only that all persons who subscribe to reasonable comprehensive views of the good share some common characteristics. Because they are to decide upon principles of justice, they must have the ability to engage in practical reason. As they are members of a society understood as “a fair system of social cooperation from one generation to the next,” they must have the capacity for a sense of justice and to form a conception of the good.54 Because they are engaging in a process of negotiation, they must be committed to the propositions that all persons are free and equal, and that the principles of justice must be acceptable to all reasonable persons.55 As I argued earlier, Rawls’s political liberalism separates the self who is committed to a comprehensive conception of the good and who inhabits the nonpolitical sphere from the self who also possesses a general commitment to public reason and justice, and inhabits the political. The principles of justice agreed upon belong to the “domain of the political.”56 They regulate only the “basic structure of society,” while private, familial, and associational activities and institutions are left to be managed according to their members’ comprehensive moral views. Rawls does concede that the social position and relations in which an individual is embedded are important in shaping their moral views: To some extent . . . the way we assess evidence and weigh moral and political values is shaped by our total experience, our whole course of life up ’til now; and our total experiences must always differ. Thus, in a modern society with its numerous offices and positions, its various dimensions of labor, its many social groups and their ethnic variety, citizens’ total experiences are disparate enough for their judgments to diverge, at least to some degree, on many if not most cases of any significant complexity.57

Interestingly, elsewhere in Political Liberalism, Rawls discusses the influence of the basic structure (the subject of justice) on the formation of character. He suggests that one of the reasons the basic structure must be ordered justly is that it affects so deeply the development of individuals, shaping “their character and aims, the kind of persons they are and aspire to be.”58 According to this line of argument, as Susan Okin points out, nonpolitical social circumstances, the influence of which upon character is noted earlier, should equally be subject to the principles of justice.59 But while Rawls concedes that membership in social groups influences the formation of moral views, the only politically relevant effect of that


membership is the view it produces. Persons are defined as the possessors of moral views, rather than as members of social groups, self- or other-defined. Moreover, as I noted earlier, Rawls is careful to differentiate moral plurality from self or class interests, as well as from “people’s understandable tendency to view the political world from a limited standpoint.”60 The subjects who decide upon principles of justice do not express either themselves or their interests as bearers of particular identities. Instead they are enabled to act politically by the moral views that they hold. In Rawls’s model, experience in the world of social relations must be transformed by reason to produce a moral position. In fact: “Prejudice and bias, self and group interest, blindness and wilfulness” are sources of unreasonable disagreement. Reason thus subsumes identity into moral belief, repressing both the materiality of experience, and the role of confrontation between difference in politics. There is little place for conflict in this version of politics, as all political difference is, by definition, resolvable by reasonable agreement. As Rawls’s critics have pointed out, his model assumes that people will be able to distinguish between their identities as political and nonpolitical subjects, and thus will be able to forgo some aspects of their comprehensive views when they come to consider political matters.61 The more fundamental problem on which this criticism is based concerns the adequacy of understanding persons to be, for all political purposes, simply the holders of moral beliefs. The politics of identity makes clear that people define themselves not only in terms of what they believe to be right, but, more fundamentally, by the roles, models, and narratives offered to them by the social groupings to which they belong. If identity cannot adequately be subsumed into the beliefs one holds, it must be excluded from a political realm constituted on the basis of those beliefs. To put it another way: Rawls’s model is unable to account for the political nature of demands for recognition that cannot be expressed as comprehensive moral views. John Gray does not quite get at the real problem when he claims that issues of cultural identity are suppressed in Rawls’s schema because that schema is too abstract. In fact, Rawls assumes that these issues are subsidiary to the moral positions to which they supposedly give rise.62 Rawls seems perhaps to sense the political importance of recognition in his discussion of self-respect. At this point, the separation of the thick, constituted ends of the self from its voluntarist, political ends threatens to collapse. Rawls argues that self-respect is a primary good, required for citizens to function as free and equal, cooperating members of society.63 Self-respect is most effectively encouraged and supported by the two principles of justice. It is conferred through public, political relations and attaches to the thin selves that inhabit that sphere. But Rawls also suggests a connection between self-respect and recognition of the thick selves of the private


sphere, through the validation of their moral ends: Self-respect is rooted in our self-confidence as a fully cooperating member of society capable of pursuing a worthwhile conception of the good over a complete life. Thus self-respect presupposes the development and exercise of moral powers and therefore an effective sense of justice. The importance of self-respect is that it provides a secure sense of our own value, a firm conviction that our determinate conception of the good is worth carrying out. Without self-respect nothing may seem worth doing, and if some things have value for us, we lack the will to pursue them. Thus the parties [deciding upon principles of justice] give great weight to how well principles of justice support self-respect, otherwise these principles cannot effectively advance the determinate conceptions of the good of those the parties represent.64

Individuals are thus entitled to self-respect not only as citizens, but also as private persons developing moral positions. If self-respect is necessary for them to regard their views of the good as worthy of pursuing, it must encompass their particular identities, from which these views are ultimately derived. As collective identification is part of individual identity for Rawls, self-respect must surely require the recognition of the worth of collective identities— especially if these have historically been subjugated and marginalized. Donald Moon also draws on moral pluralism as the defining characteristic of societies such as our own in his advocacy of political liberalism.65 “Moral pluralism exists when people hold opposed moral principles, or incompatible conceptions of the good, or ideals of excellence, or when their particular identities and attachments lead to systematic differences on questions of policy.”66 It results from the coexistence of incompatible but equally ultimate systems of value, each of which commands a significant following within a society. For Moon as for Rawls, moral beliefs are related to social affiliations: “Ties of family, love, friendship and attachments to land and home can give rise to moral pluralism when they lead to distinct group identities and significant cultural differences within a society.”67 Nevertheless, it is the moral views themselves, rather than the social identities giving rise to them, which pose a problem for the liberal state. As Moon notes, several solutions have been proposed to the problem of how to adjudicate disputes caused by moral pluralism. Attempts to find commonalities based on shared humanity and a “thick and vague” conception of the self have been unsuccessful.68 This comes as no surprise in light of the arguments of identity politics. Any thick conception of the self that attempts to encompass all citizens must inevitably be so vague as to be meaningless, given the way in which individuals are constituted by membership in a range of different groups apart from the nation. And those who seek commonality in autonomy and self-realization must assume that all moral


conceptions share those ideals.69 Contractarian theories that attempt to identify a basis for agreement on the constitution of the political rest upon a false essentialism: they deploy a conception of human nature which enables them to argue that “there are certain norms that everyone has reason to accept, and which therefore are binding on everyone.”70 But the theory itself cannot show why these aspects of human nature it assumes should always be essential, rather than others. Moon concludes that liberal theory cannot deal with the problem of moral pluralism by positing a comprehensive conception of human nature.71 Instead he adopts a pragmatic version of the contractarian approach: community is nevertheless possible under conditions of moral pluralism, because: “significant commonalities” will always exist, arising as they will from the desire for political accommodation among adherents to a range of beliefs. These commonalities mirror the function of commitment to public reason and to social cooperation in Rawls’s model. Moon’s preferred version of political liberalism operates as a strategy in which a specifically political conception of the self is deployed, to enable people to find a basis for political association. Accordingly, liberalism must self-consciously adopt a “thin” conception of the self as an “abstraction from the rich complexities of actual human lives, designed to respond to the specific problems of creating a political community.”72 The thin self must be “sufficiently determinate to provide principles that everyone can accept as defining a just basis for cooperation.”73 Its basis is recognition of others as free and equal agents: “We must abstract from the particular identities we have discovered and chosen and base our political lives on an admittedly narrow understanding of ourselves in terms of our capacity for agency.”74 Liberalism remains neutral on the nature of the self in its private and social spheres of operation: The account of the commonalities on which we should base our public life are not offered as a “social ontology”; they should not be seen as theories of human nature or as specifying the “essential” aspects of human beings. The only requirement is that the various groups in the society will be able to recognize some significant aspect of their own self-understandings in the public or common model, so that they can see the point and value of the principles to which this model gives rise.75

Moon’s formulation recognizes more clearly than Rawls’s that the political self is abstracted from particularist identities as well as comprehensive moral views. Moon suggests that the thickly constituted and thin aspects of personality correspond to the difference between what Michael Sandel calls the voluntarist and cognitive elements of the self. The cognitive elements consist in the self coming to reflect upon, know and understand itself, while


the voluntarist elements involve choice of one’s ends and aims.76 The liberal project, Moon concludes, draws upon the voluntarist ends of the self. Where Moon departs most clearly from Rawls is in his acknowledgment that some political conflicts may not be solved on the basis of this minimal commonality. These he designates “tragic,” suggesting only that in their case, political decisions must simply be imposed—presumably, by the strongest group.77 But he also suggests another more revealing exception to the thin self strategy, in which neutrality is undesirable. The state may sponsor nationalist or patriotic rituals and ceremonies, although some citizens might oppose them. This is because nationalism is a “constitutive attachment,” and such attachments are, Moon argues, not only communal, but also political. Nationalism expresses the desire for political autonomy, but more importantly, it is differentiated from other attachments in that, for many people: “the nation is an essential part of their self-identity, something that gives significance and purpose to their lives, something for which they are (or think they ought to be) prepared to die.”78 As I argue in more detail in chapter four, identity politics shows that nationalism is less exceptional a case than Moon supposes. Certainly the nation is publicly celebrated in myth and ritual, as he points out, but it is not clear that it represents any more fundamental an aspect of people’s selfidentity than their membership in other social groupings.79 Identification with the nation is specific to issues and context. While in foreign policy national identity may be fundamental, in the domestic political context the evidence suggests that people understand their identity just as completely in, for example, race or gender terms. Once a range of social affiliations are recognized as constitutive attachments, and hence as political, thin selves may appear less useful as a strategy for negotiating political issues. Finally, I turn briefly to Charles Larmore’s version of political liberalism. Of the three I consider, this model most explicitly denies the political relevance of identity. Larmore observes that pluralism, defined as reasonable disagreement, has come in modernity to be regarded as a crucial feature of the good life. Given moral pluralism, state neutrality is the primary value and justificatory principle of liberalism, a political ideal that governs public relations between persons and the state.80 Larmore’s justification of state neutrality is based on the universal norm of rational dialogue, according to which conversing parties, when faced with disagreement, will retreat to neutral ground to attempt to resolve the matter. Not all conversation aims at reasoned agreement, but political conversation must, because its aim is to achieve a modus vivendi in the context of moral pluralism.81 Rational discussion requires that equal respect be shown to all participants—respect that is owed to others “by virtue of their capacity for working out a coherent view of the world and . . . of the good life.”82 The act of participating in


rational discussion and justifying our positions to others necessarily implies that others have a perspective which justifies their own actions, and which they will apply to our positions.83 The political conception of the person in this model is thus that of a rational holder of moral beliefs, participating in dialogue. While a dialogical model does not necessarily exclude recognition of the social sources of identity,84 Larmore argues even more strongly than Moon that constitutive ties operate in the private, rather than the public political realm, where persons are to be “treated apart from status and ascription, not as constitutively identified with any roles or groups.”85 While liberalism does not require an individualistic view of the person, Larmore asserts that it does require political individualism, according to which social ties have no bearing upon what takes place in the political sphere.86 Autonomous Agency and Plural Identity It’s clear that Rawls and Larmore would agree with Moon that the liberal project, as political and public, should emphasize what we distinguished earlier as the voluntarist, rather than the cognitive elements of the self. All three assume a view of the self, as possessor of freely chosen moral views, which I have criticized earlier. It is not only political liberalism that makes this assumption. In his study of liberal pluralism, in which he defends a comprehensive pluralism, William Galston speaks of cultural identification in terms of choice. Disagreement with the values of a cultural community is interpreted as the desire to leave the community.87 I have argued that the voluntarist view of the self is unsatisfactory from the perspective of identity politics. Does this mean that identity politics relies upon the cognitive view of the subject proposed by communitarianism? In fact, from the point of view of the complex and multiple approach to identity I defended earlier, the dichotomy between voluntarist and cognitive views of the subject is unsatisfactory. In order to support a liberal theory based on identity pluralism, we need to reformulate autonomous agency in such a way that recognizes that selves who are complexly socially constructed reflect upon and choose their ends. Now, autonomous agency has been understood to mean the ability to make choices from a range of alternatives, conceive life projects, and act to carry these out. I adopt here Richard Flathman’s definition of these terms, according to which simple agency implies no evaluation of how a person’s purposes are derived or chosen, or the degree of success with which they are carried out. Autonomy involves more than this: that purposes are chosen reflectively and are not simply imitations of those chosen by others, and further, that the person is more or less regularly successful in carrying those


purposes out.88 There are thus two aspects to autonomous agency: the acquisition of ends and their pursuit.89 Together, Rawls notes, they constitute a human life: “. . . each individual has a rational plan of life drawn up subject to the conditions that confront him. This plan is designed to permit the harmonious satisfaction of his interests.”90 The contentious issue for communitarians and for my project is: from where are those ends derived, and from what position does reflection take place? It’s useful to distinguish here between what we might term strong and weak versions of autonomy. According to the strong view, individuals must consider choices that do not derive from their own experience, nor could be understood as being determined in any way. Flathman describes this as the requirement that a person’s purposes are “in some degree distinctive by comparison with the actions of others with whom she is involved.”91 As David Johnston puts it : “Agents are beings who are capable of conceiving values and projects that are not about their own experience, and are capable of acting to realize those values and projects.”92 The weaker version of autonomous agency, as defended by Gerald Dworkin, is that it does not matter whether a person’s purposes are the same as those of all others around them (in what we might call her identity groups) as long as she is capable of “second-order” reflection upon those purposes, and is able to accept or attempt to change them.93 There is a clear relationship between autonomous agency and moral pluralism: in that it rests upon the choice and pursuit of moral ideals or “purposes and causes” as Rawls puts it, autonomous agency both causes and assumes moral pluralism.94 Johnston points out that a society of agents will allow diverse conceptions of the good life to flourish.95 However it is also clear that the relationship is reciprocal; a range of conceptions of the good is required for agency, because without this, persons will be unable to conceive of values and ends that are outside their experience. As Raz argues, moral pluralism enables autonomy in the sense that “individuals should develop freely to find for themselves the form of the good which they wish to pursue in their life.”96 Autonomy requires not only appropriate mental abilities and the independence to enable one to choose freely, but also an adequate range of options.97 This concept of autonomy is, as Nancy Rosenblum has pointed out, part of the “Romantic reconstruction of liberal thought.”98 I investigate the impact of this reconstruction on the work of early liberals like J.S. Mill later in this book, but it is important to note here the relationship between moral pluralism and autonomy understood as self-creation through the choice of ends.99 As we have seen, however, a plurality of group membership underlies moral pluralism, and cannot, despite the arguments of political liberals, be excluded from politics. This revised ontology that underlies identity politics


poses more of a problem for the requirements of distinctiveness and critical reflection. Distinctiveness of purpose as an essential requirement may be dispensed with if we adopt the weaker version of autonomy, which is clearly more compatible with the view that persons are significantly constructed by, and derive their purposes from, membership in social groups. Persons may thus accept the values into which they have been socialized (or which they have “ingested with their mother’s milk,” as Loren Lomasky puts it100) but they do so consciously and after critical reflection. But the view of identity politics for which I have argued also precludes a central and unconstructed core of the self from which reflection and rational evaluation may take place. How then can the process of reflection occur? As I discussed briefly earlier, communitarians have already responded to this problem by attacking the very basis of the liberal view of autonomous agency. In his analysis of the failures of deontological liberalism, Sandel argues that the definition of agency in terms of the choice and pursuit of ends rests upon the separation of a prior given self from its ends.101 He prefers a model of cognitive agency, according to which the self decides upon its purposes “not by choice but by reflection, as knowing (or inquiring) subject to object of self-understanding.”102 When the self is understood as the product of, rather than as prior to its ends, “agency consists less in summoning the will than in seeking self-understanding.”103 For communitarians, agency comprises the process of coming to realization of one’s social constitution. This process of social constitution produces what Sandel terms the “intersubjective conception of identity,” which acknowledges constitutive ties to social groups (family, community, class, or nation).104 As I have argued, however, Sandel fails to consider the complexity of the social context that subjects inhabit. The existence of multiple groups complicates the social identification that Sandel argues is necessary for justice. For one thing, national groups are not homogeneous and, as critics have pointed out, social norms are not uncontested, but are imposed by dominant groups within a society, to the exclusion of others.105 Moreover, the fact of overlapping membership and identification must also complicate agency. Sandel’s only suggestion of complexity is in the “intrasubjective conception” of the self, which refers to a “plurality of selves within a single individual human being, as when we account for inner deliberation in terms of the pull of competing identities.”106 In the light of the identity politics critique, we might conclude that the intrasubjective plurality of subjectivity results in fact from intersubjective processes in a plural communal or cultural context. Agency must thus involve as a first step the coming to self-knowledge of the complex social, as well as personal aspects of identity. The problem of how to theorize critical reflection upon these ends seems less recalcitrant given this complexity.


Influenced in the direction of a range of ends, persons weigh these against each other, sometimes deciding in one direction, sometimes another. We perceive aspects of ourselves from the point of view of other aspects, and thus the process of self-understanding leads to reflection and decision. The self is able to reflect “critically on the values which have governed its socialization,”107 although it cannot step outside all aspects of its identity at once, into an unsituated subject-position.108 Now, this process of reflection should satisfy the weaker version of autonomy I described earlier, in that second-order reflection is taking place. One result of adopting it is that, insofar as formulating purposes goes, it becomes difficult to imagine any nonautonomous adults in Western pluralist societies, given that we are all, as I have argued plurally and complexly constructed. This is perhaps why philosophers find it difficult to present realistic examples of heteronomous individuals. In fact, as Dworkin points out, stricter definitions of autonomy tend to lead to the conclusion that it is mainly professors of philosophy who really enjoy autonomy.109 To suggest that the less educated are unable to detach themselves from their environments and influences uncomfortably recalls notions of false consciousness. Of course, autonomy also requires that persons have a reasonable chance of successfully carrying those purposes out—a much more difficult condition. Prisoners in jail may be able autonomously to choose their purposes, but are not at liberty to carry out their plans. Less obviously but no less importantly, persons technically at liberty may be presented by economic and social constraints from carrying out their plans in an autonomous manner. Prejudice against groups may in fact function as such a restriction.110 A prospective Latina neurosurgeon may find herself prevented from realizing her goals by the prejudice against her and lack of support amongst the North American medical establishment. A Native American activist aspiring to political office may be ignored by voters who believe that indigenous issues are unimportant and irrelevant. To the extent that purposes are linked to group membership, autonomy in fact is not only compatible with, but requires, the recognition of group membership. Conclusion The claims of identity politics show that the moral plurality discussed by political liberals is in fact grounded in social group pluralism; that societies such as our own must be understood as culturally as well as morally pluralist. As Joshua Cohen describes it, cultural pluralism consists in “the existence of groups of people within a single society who share distinct histories and ways of life, and a common identity as members of a group.”111 This is not to say of course that moral pluralism is not important, nor that some


socially divisive issues cannot be understood usefully in terms of divergent moral views. But moral views, as even political liberals concede, derive from a social and cultural context of membership and affiliation. I have argued that the separation of these views from membership, and, crucially, the designation of the latter as pre- or nonpolitical is artificial and unsustainable. The case of abortion, conventionally viewed as one of fundamental and irreconcilable moral difference, is a good example here. Opposing parties obviously differ in their opinions about the moral status of the fetus. But case studies have also shown that activists on both sides base their claims on their understandings of the appropriate identity and role of women—and it is different understandings of this distinct range of issue that tend to produce different views of the duties owed to the fetus. That some antichoice as well as pro-choice proponents argue that they speak for women as a group only underscores the many ways in which identity for women is articulated in terms of class, religion, and race.112 The controversy over the publication in Britain of Salmon Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and attacks upon it by British Muslims well illustrates the inadequacy of understanding social conflict in strictly moral terms. The dispute over the novel and the fatwa issued against Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran is generally understood as centering upon different attitudes to both freedom of artistic speech and the separation of religion from politics.113 But the angry response of British Muslims to the book must also be understood as part of a general grievance that they are not adequately recognized as a group under British law. Tariq Modood points out that British Muslims have not been legally defined as a racial or ethnic group, and hence receive no protection against discrimination as a group, which weakens their rights in housing, employment, and so on, or against offensive literature.114 Modood notes that an attack upon the honor of the Prophet Muhammad is an attack upon a fundamental part of British Muslim identity, and argues that legal protection against such attacks is “necessary for Muslims to be symbolically and actually accepted and made a part of Britain; without that fundamental respect for their dignity they will become an increasingly alienated community at odds with their neighbors.”115 This tension between mainstream views of Islam as a set of beliefs, and the self-understanding of Muslims as members of an identity group has continued to cause problems in Western societies with immigrant Muslim communities, as I show in chapter six. Once we accept the fundamental plurality of social membership, and its role in constituting identity, it becomes impossible to accept the separation between thickly constituted private selves and the thin public selves assumed by political liberalism. Because identity cannot fully be expressed as a set of moral principles held by an individual, it cannot be excluded


from a political sphere created on the basis of moral belief alone. Thin selves defined in terms of commitment to rational debate, to recognition of equal agency, or to social cooperation will constitute only a part of the political subject. The problem of political cooperation can be solved only by engaging with socially constructed identity, not by repressing it. The neutral conception of the state thus fails not because it cannot be accepted by holders of diverse moral positions, but because it fails to take account of essentially political matters that cannot be subsumed into moral beliefs. I return to the implications of this for democratic theory in chapter five. All this might seem to lead to the conclusion that liberal theory is too bound by its commitment to political individualism to adequately account for the claims of identity politics. Such a conclusion has been reached by many theorists of identity themselves. It is the aim of this book to show that liberal theory can be revised to account for these claims, while at the same time restoring to identity politics the importance of voluntary action and selfidentification. The basis for a revised liberalism, as well as the grounds for modern confusions about pluralism lie in the political thought of John Stuart Mill and later liberals. I have shown here how moral views have subsumed identity in political liberalism; in tracing the development of liberal thought from Mill to the twentieth century, we see how identity has also become subordinated to interest. I explore this process in chapters two and three, establishing first the basis for liberal identity pluralism in the thought of Mill.


Chapter Two Class, Nation, and Character in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought

John Stuart Mill’s work is a key point of origin for modern liberal pluralism— but it is a much more complex origin than is generally acknowledged. Mill has been claimed as a “founding father” for both liberal moral pluralism and multiculturalism, but in fact the fundamental source of pluralism for him was what we now call membership in social groups, structured in relations of power. Mill’s liberalism is designed for a society in which individuals are deeply influenced by their group membership, the identity politics of his time; it is later theorists who shift liberalism away from acknowledging any social membership except for national culture. In this chapter I examine Mill’s identity pluralism and the trajectory liberal thought takes after Mill. As we shall see, identity is transformed into interest, and as a result the stage is set for moral pluralism, interest pluralism, and multiculturalism to dominate modern liberal theory. Mill’s defense of individual liberty is cited by his liberal supporters as a fundamental argument for both the inescapability and value of moral pluralism in modern democracies.1 A plurality of beliefs and opinions is essential, Mill famously argues in On Liberty, to both social and individual moral progress. In the context of multicultural politics, the pluralism assumed is cultural rather than moral, and, here too, Mill is invoked by liberal theorists reexamining the relationship between individual identity and national culture. Will Kymlicka cites Mill’s argument that the political characters, principles, and practices of individuals are not universally identical, but rather are shaped by their particular national membership.2 Mill is cast as an early, if limited, cultural pluralist, who argues that political principles and institutions should be suited to particular communities. The relationship between these two versions of pluralism is not immediately obvious; in fact they might seem to be contradictory. Mill’s moral pluralism implies the free choice of beliefs, while his national pluralism suggests a constructing, if


not determining, relationship between national membership and social and political views. Critics of both these readings of Mill suggest that the apparent contradiction in these two sources of plurality in fact masks the fundamental monism of his attitudes toward moral values and national cultures. Shirley Letwin portrays him as a paternalist idealist who believed that the task of the educated was to prescribe to the unenlightened, ways to lead better and more fulfilled lives.3 In a parallel argument, Bhikhu Parekh argues that Mill’s commitment to cultural diversity is limited by his Romantic individualist assumptions that autonomy and self-development are the best values according to which life should be led.4 Consequently, only those national cultures that express these (liberal) values are worthy of recognition and independence. In the course of my discussion of Mill as an identity pluralist, I will make two fundamental arguments. First, his analysis of the political consequences of cultural and moral differences must be separated from the hierarchical scale to which he assigns cultures, and his hopes for moral progress. While Mill concedes that not all cultural communities or moral positions are equally admirable, he nevertheless assumes pluralities of class interests, moral beliefs, and national cultures as social realities flowing from the organization of social and political power, and requiring recognition and representation.5 As this suggests, a diversity of moral beliefs is, for Mill, inextricably related in present circumstances to the existence of a diversity of social groups, including class. Thus, second, the relationship between moral and cultural or social pluralism in Mill’s thought must be understood in the context of his analysis of group membership and the social construction of identity. I argue that Mill saw a plurality of beliefs and opinions as a result of the underlying plurality of social classes and groups that characterizes modern mass democracies. In this, he reflected new social and political realities in mid-Victorian Britain, particularly the demands of workers and middle-class women for political rights and the extension of the franchise. Utilitarianism, the dominant political theory of the early part of the century, had recognized the legitimacy of extended political rights, while maintaining a methodological individualism that assumed the analytical and moral equivalence of all persons. But liberals like Mill and his later followers had to respond to emergent nationalism and socialism, and community membership and social context played a central role in their thought, in legitimizing both individual rights and liberties as well as those state interventions designed to ensure them.6 In my view, Mill’s ideas about character and identity formation constitute an early argument for the political recognition of group membership, both national and social. I trace the ways in which later nineteenth-century

nineteenth-century liberal thought / 37

liberal thinkers, Idealist T.H. Green and New liberal L.T. Hobhouse, followed Mill in acknowledging that individual identity was constructed by both social environment and conscious self-determination. As I show, however, their views of the social sources of identity differed fundamentally from Mill’s. While Mill employed a decentralized model of society, focusing on the effects of people’s assignment to a range of subnational groups (though especially class), later liberals were less concerned with membership in such groups than with individuals’ roles as citizens, and the ways in which they were constructed by membership in society as a whole. Later liberals were in fact deeply suspicious of class-based arguments, emphasizing much more than Mill the importance of the common good. This corresponded with a new focus among Idealists and collectivist New liberals alike on the role to be played by the state in shaping economic and social policy. Divorced from its role in shaping personality, group membership reverted to representing the voluntary expression of the interests of an already constructed (by national membership) and existing individual. This liberal revision of Mill’s work on social construction set the stage for two quite different theoretical developments in the twentieth century. The characterization of group membership in terms of interest influenced the early British pluralists G.D.H. Cole and Harold Laski, and is reflected in later American interest pluralism. But modern “cultural” liberals such as Kymlicka and Tamir, who argue for the protection of minority national cultures, are also the heirs of post-Millian liberal thinkers in their assumption that determining relations between groups and individuals are produced by national communities. I discuss these two developments in chapters three and four. Mill’s views on the constitution of identity are, I conclude, more fundamentally and plurally constructionist than any of the later theories of liberal pluralism. Mill regarded national membership as one among many forms of social affiliation that shape individual identity. While he argued for the importance of free debate and discussion in forming and changing people’s beliefs, he also recognized that the reality was that most people’s opinions derived from their identities as class and group members, and that individuals had therefore to be represented as members of groups in the political process. Identity and Character Mill and his contemporaries did not of course refer to identity; it was character, rather, that preoccupied nineteenth-century social and political commentators.7 As Stefan Collini has shown, Victorian liberals understood character in two different senses. In the descriptive sense, it was defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the sum of the mental and moral


qualities which distinguish an individual or race viewed as a homogeneous whole; the individuality impressed by nature and habit on man or nation; mental or moral constitution.” Collini summarizes this, as it pertains to personal character, as “an individual’s settled dispositions.”8 Victorian liberals understood character in this sense to be strongly influenced by environment. Moral character, on the other hand, represented an ideal or standard necessary for political progress, which could be fostered by state or charitable intervention, but which was also regarded by some as an essential prerequisite for charity—as in the case of the “deserving poor.” Neither meaning of the term is exactly synonymous with the concept of identity in use today, which incorporates more sophisticated understandings of the influences of hereditary and early psychological development than those available to pre-Freudian liberals. But our understanding of identity, as the essence of individual selfhood, corresponds most closely to the descriptive sense of character. Identity includes both socially and intersubjectively acquired roles, and individual aspects.9 Similarly, Victorian liberals believed character to be influenced by varying combinations of inheritance, family, and personal and social circumstances. Character in both senses was crucial to Victorian political thought. From Mill to Green and Spencer, all assumed that the purpose of government was the improvement of moral character.10 At the same time, a certain type of character in the descriptive sense was regarded as necessary to the full enjoyment of individual rights and liberties.11 A person’s character in both senses was made both by and for him or herself, and this led, as Collini points out, to an unresolved tension between determinism and voluntarism in Victorian thought on character development: On the one hand, each individual is regarded as the ultimate author of his own fate: overwhelming social circumstances are an inadmissable plea. On the other hand, political principles are constantly challenged on the grounds that they will weaken character, by presenting temptations which the individuals in question will be unable to resist, and thereby warping the habits that will ineluctably govern their actions in the future.12

Influenced by Romantic conceptions of the expressive individual personality, later nineteenth-century liberals replaced the model of man as consumer and maximizer of pleasures with the ideal of a self-cultivating individual, embarked upon a lifelong quest for self-development through the exercise of life choices.13 Freedom was essential in political arrangements because it made possible both self-assertion and self-authorship. There is a teleological aspect to this liberal thought on the self, but individual involvement in the process of choosing is so strong that liberal ontology is best understood in terms of self-creation, rather than unfolding.14


However, liberals during this period were also aware that the human capacity to choose was to some extent influenced not only by the acts of others, but also by social and economic circumstances. Mill’s essay on the subjection of women is a central statement of this idea. Thus character formation constituted both the legitimizing ground for state intervention to alter social and economic conditions, and the chief argument against such intervention.15 I argue here that the determination of character arose as an issue for liberals not only when it came to state intervention, but also with respect to group membership and position. The tension between voluntarism and determinism clearly led to problems at the policy level. But it also reflected a fundamental tension between the Romantic ideals of self-authorship and self-construction of character, and an incipient sociological recognition of the influence of already existing social circumstances and structures upon character in the descriptive sense. While Mill argued strenuously for the importance of free choice in developing and shaping personal character, he also recognized that social and economic position—class membership— played a crucial role in shaping the individual. The Science of Character in Mill’s Thought Crucial to Mill’s rejection of Benthamite utilitarianism after his early psychological crisis was his critique of Bentham’s assumption of the universality and materiality of human nature—of the view that “human nature could be reduced to a few philosophical precepts analytically stated in the language of universality.”16 Utilitarianism’s subjects were self-oriented individuals, all of whom were impelled by the same basic needs and desired the same basic goods. This led Bentham to ignore the “spiritual aspects” of human character and to focus exclusively on the material aspects of life. Mill argued that Bentham’s doctrine applied only as a type of prudential guide, advising people as to how to achieve their desires, but remaining unconcerned with the quality of desires, and with the importance of cultivating the desiring self.17 Mill countered that there exists no single model of human life or nature: human character is infinitely diverse and demonstrates “extraordinary susceptibility to external influences.”18 The multitudinous shaping factors are both inherited and social; they include social and economic position, sex, partiality, and disposition: “Every circumstance which gives a character to the life of a human being carries with it its particular biases; its peculiar facilities for perceiving some things, and for missing or forgetting others.”19 Mill termed the study of the formation of character “ethology,” defined in A System of Logic as “the ulterior science which determines the kind of character produced in conformity to [the general laws of mind], by any set of circumstances, physical or moral.”20


Ethology referred not only to the formation of personal character through the art of education (or, as we would now term it, socialization) but also to the construction of collective character, the study of which Mill termed “political ethology.”21 As dictionary definitions of the period make explicit, “character” applied as much to nations and peoples as to persons, and in fact Mill wrote later in the Logic, “the laws of national (or collective) character are by far the most important class of sociological laws.”22 Collectivities in this case include national communities, but are clearly not limited to them. Mill lists various factors that come to influence human nature. In making national comparisons between the French and English, for example, he mentions “differences of government, and former customs and physical peculiarities.” In comparing men and women, relevant factors include “diversity of education, occupations, personal independence and social privileges, and whatever original differences there may be in bodily strength and nervous sensibility.”23 National character was a central preoccupation for Mill, impelled as he was by his interest in France, and in comparisons between that country and England, and also by his official role in the British mission in India.24 His attitude toward nationalism has been the subject of considerable recent dispute: as Georgios Varouxakis has pointed out, contradictory interpretations of Mill have led to his enlistment in support of both minority autonomy and Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism.25 The reality was that he was both impressed and concerned by the rise of nationalist sentiment in Europe. Mill was strongly critical of exclusionary and “tribalist” national sentiment and preferred states to comprise a heterogeneous mix of ethnic and cultural groups that would be mutually enriching.26 But where nationalist sentiment existed, he concluded that there was a prima facie case for people to be united together in their own state.27 In his attitude toward nationality, as in his analysis of class attachments, as I discuss later, Mill draws a distinction between interests and group sentiments that actually motivate people in the present, and that must be taken into account in social policy, and the ultimate social goal of transcending particularity. When lineaments of national character could be identified, what was crucial was that they be reflected by political institutions, so as to ensure systems of government under which citizens could best progress.28 As this suggests, the relationship between national character and appropriate systems of government is reciprocal for Mill: government’s aim must be to improve the character of its subjects, although it will not be able to do so unless government itself reflects existing national character.29 Critics who see Mill as an ethnocentric integrationist, with little regard for minority cultures, argue that his theory of the historical development of national communities and consequent hierarchy of cultures led him to assume


that only “advanced” peoples were entitled to national self-determination. It is important to note here that the question of national autonomy turns crucially for Mill on the existence of national consciousness. Mill saw some national cultures as more historically evolved than others, and argued that small cultural communities such as the Scottish Highlanders and the Basques were not viable as nations and should abandon their aims of selfdetermination and assimilate to the more advanced majority nation.30 In the case of India, Mill’s support for the British imperialist project suggests most strongly that his belief in a hierarchy of cultures along a progressive historical continuum ultimately outweighed his recognition of minority cultures. Uday Mehta’s recent critique of Mill and the exclusionary impulse within universalist liberalism lends powerful support to Bhikhu Parekh’s view of Mill as a cultural monist.31 But as Mehta himself points out, Mill’s error here stems from his view of India, shared by other liberal colonial administrators, as simply a disparate region, with no cultural, political, social, or religious unity. Thus he fails to recognize nineteenth-century India as a nation, and its people as possessing or expressing nationalist consciousness or sentiment.32 While this failure reveals Mill’s limited capacity to recognize national cultural communities, read with his support for nationalist movements in non-Western European nations, the Indian case does not contradict Mill’s argument that national communities merit selfgovernment. In “Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848,” written in 1849, Mill states: So long, indeed, as a people are incapable of self-government, it is often better for them to be under the despotism of foreigners than of natives, when these foreigners are more advanced in civilization and cultivation than themselves. But when their hour of freedom . . . . has struck, without their having become merged and blended in the nationality of their conquerors, the re-conquest of their own is often an indispensable condition either to obtaining free institutions, or to the possibility, were they ever obtained, of working them in the spirit of freedom.33

Mill’s emphasis on individual liberties has often led critics to ignore his explicit recognition of the importance of locating people within specific national communities. It is this aspect of his theory that is cited by theorists arguing today that liberalism has always recognized that the individual is situated in a social context. Mill argued that the national character that shaped a people determined the type of political institutions to which they should be subject. In his defence of liberty and representative government, he explicitly limits both to nations whose citizens share particular characteristics—the clearest case being, of course, the British.34 The paradigmatic theorist of individuality recognized that individuality and liberty


could apply only to people who are members of specific historical communities. Kymlicka argues that for Mill, as for later thinkers, such as Green, Hobhouse, and Dewey, “commonality of cultural membership wasn’t in conflict with individual freedom but rather was its precondition.”35 For these early liberals, the identity of the liberal bearer of rights was guaranteed by particular cultural membership. But for Mill, unlike later liberals, cultural membership was not limited to national community. Unlike earlier liberals and radicals, Mill was prompted by the political agitation of newly emerging social movements to engage explicitly with the demands by workers and women for inclusion in the democratic process. The utilitarianism of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham had adopted an ethical position of strict individualism, according to which all individuals were to be counted equally and the same in the calculus of pain and pleasure. Persons were defined essentially as possessors of appetites and maximizers of utility.36 In the wake of electoral reform in 1832, however, working-class demands for extension of the suffrage and the Chartist movement provoked liberals to respond to both the polarization of society into opposing, politically active groups, and the specific condition of the working classes. Mill writes in “The Claims of Labour”: The democratic movement among the operative classes, commonly known as Chartism, was the first open separation of interest, feeling and opinion between the labouring part of the Commonwealth and all above them. It was the result of nearly all the active talent, and a great part of the physical force, of the working classes, against their whole relation to society.37

As Macpherson comments, Mill was the first liberal to see the incompatibility between claims of equal human development and existing classbased inequalities of power and wealth.38 He had inherited Bentham’s suspicion of “sinister interests,” and he and later liberals maintained a dislike for government on the basis of single class interests.39 This formed the basis for later liberal distrust of the emerging Labour Party, which was understood to be sectional, and a threat to the established Constitutional Order. But class domination could be avoided, and the Constitutional Order preserved, only by the balanced representation of all classes.40 Mill argued for recognition of the rights of minorities, partly because he and later liberals could foresee the domination of politics by the working classes, who were the most numerous. Thus Mill was concerned to protect not only minority moral positions, but also minority interests. The balancing of interests had antecedents in earlier liberal thought. J.W. Burrow points out that Mill deployed the language of eighteenth-century Country Whigs in his concern with the need to balance the will of the majority with the ensured representation of minority interests. But as Burrow concludes,


Mill speaks “in the language of his time” when he refers to a balance of classes. An old-fashioned Whig would have spoken of estates or orders, and a modern Burkean, of social interests.41 It is to class that Mill chiefly refers in analyzing the character of various groups within English society. As Richard Ashcraft has shown, Mill employed his revised definition of political science and the methodological tools of social analysis to discuss political power not in abstract terms, but “in terms of the class interests that structured and exercised it.”42 I have already noted his argument against Bentham that human nature is not universal but reflects a complex of social conditions. A person’s opinions and interests are shaped by personal temper and disposition, but also by position, education, and opportunities for observation and enquiry.43 These factors are understood crucially to shape both character and the self-interest that derived from it, and of primary importance is economic position and means. Class is for Mill a group whose members share the same social and economic position, and thus similar characters and particular interests. On the basis of “selfish interest in the form of class interest” is founded a class morality that advances those interests.44 As a category, class is not restricted to economic divisions, but encompasses numerous social groups defined in terms of their relations of domination and subordination to each other: “Spartans and Helots . . . planters and negroes . . . princes and subjects . . . nobles and roturiers . . .” and men and women.45 Apart from relations of power between the sexes, however, it is with relations between aristocrats, the middle class, and the working class that Mill is most concerned.46 Both gender and economic class fundamentally shape the identities and viewpoints of individuals. In “The Subjection of Women” Mill describes the way in which women’s characters and natures have been determined by their subordinate social position: “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters.”47 Economic class also shapes character: Mill describes members of the aristocracy as greedy and venal, with little initiative, energy, or urge for selfimprovement. This follows inevitably from the fact that they belong to a class whom “the natural course of things progressively enriches, consistently with complete passiveness on their own part . . . . They grow rich, as it were, in their sleep, without working, risking or economizing.”48 The rising, self-developing middle classes, however, are men (and potentially women) of aspiration and enterprise.49 Mill addresses the issue of working-class character at length in “Principles of Political Economy,” where he argues that, for most workers, material deprivation and the requirements of


constant menial labor from which they share no profit has led to serious deficiencies in moral character and intellect. On the other hand, some groups of workers who are better educated, more knowledgeable of politics, and who share in the profits of their labor exhibit more intelligence, good sense, responsibility, and moral character.50 It is in fact class identity that determines the political attitudes of individuals toward each other in Britain. In “The Claims of Labour,” Mill writes of the “animosity which is universal in this country towards the whole class of employers in the whole class of the employed.”51 And in his essay on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, he observes: Where the different classes of mankind are divided by impassable barriers, each may have intense sympathies with his own class, more intense than it is almost possible to have with mankind in general; but those who are far below him in condition are so unlike himself, that he hardly considers them as human beings; and if they are refractory and troublesome, will be unable to feel for them even that kindly interest which he experiences for his unresisting domestic cattle.52

The formation of character on the basis of class or group membership produces group-specific interests and opinions. It is here that Mill’s ambivalence about sectional identities, noted by his critics, becomes apparent. On the one hand, he believed that elected representatives should represent not just specific interests, but those of the community as a whole—the common good: “In this as in every other case, it is not separating classes of persons and organizing them apart, but fusing them with other classes very different from themselves, which eliminates class interests and class feeling.”53 But while Mill suspects particular interests, he argues for universal suffrage on the grounds that men could not represent the interests of women equally and justly,54 and the interests of the working classes could not properly be represented by those who did not share their outlooks or desires. As “each is the only safe guardian of his own rights and interests,”55 so each class has a particular viewpoint and interests that others cannot recognize and properly represent.56 As Janice Carlisle has shown, Mill argues specifically for class representation in his maiden speech to the House of Commons, delivered on April 13, 1866, in support of Gladstone’s Representation of the People bill.57 Relying for purposes of argument on the constitutionalist principle that classes, rather than individuals should be represented in the Commons, Mill points out that, whatever their character, the working classes deserve representation in their own name.58 Minority representation could further be justified on the grounds that political participation would enable minority group members more clearly


to perceive the interests of the community as a whole, and thus to develop their characters in the moral or evaluative sense: “Among the foremost benefits of free government is that education of the intelligence and of sentiments which is carried down to the very lowest ranks of the people when they are called to take a part in acts which directly affect the great interests of their country.”59 As we saw in the case of national self-determination, self-government was desirable because it both reflected the interests of national communities and helped those interests to advance and progress. Ultimately, Mill attempts to reconcile the problem of representation of minority interests with the common good by contrasting the present state of society with a progressive ideal. While recognition of and identification with the common good is the end of human progress, until that end is achieved, the representation of minority viewpoints is essential: As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when anyone thinks fit to try them.60

Moral pluralism is, moreover, both a means to an end and a good in itself. As Carlisle has shown, in Mill’s final argument in the Commons for the franchise bill, he points out that it would only benefit his fellow members if they were able to hear and learn from the experiences and perspectives of working-class members: Are there many of us who so perfectly understand the subject of apprentices, let us say, or of the hours of labour, as to have nothing to learn on the subject from intelligent operatives . . . . What is asked is a sufficient representation [of the working classes] to ensure that their opinions are fairly placed before the House, and are met by real arguments, addressed to their own reason, by people who can enter into their way of looking at the subjects in which they are concerned.61

The end of social progress can be achieved only by the recognition of diversity. That Mill became strongly convinced of the importance of recognizing and representing the working-class perspective by the end of his life is clear in his “Chapters on Socialism.” He argues that “politics are now scientifically studied from the point of view of the working classes, and opinions conceived in the special interest of those classes are organized into systems and creeds which lay claim to a place on the platform of political philosophy.”62


The strength of class interests is also implicit in Mill’s concern about the tyranny of majorities. If society as a whole is to progress, political institutions have to be structured to prevent the dominant class from legislating to serve its own particular interests. Class is so fundamental a source of identity that numerical majorities must inevitably be class majorities. One of the greatest dangers of democracy, he writes, “lies in the sinister interests of the holders of power: it is the dangers of class legislation; of government intended for (whether really effecting it or not) the immediate benefit of the dominant class, to the lasting detriment of the whole.”63 His chief concern in “On Liberty” is to prevent the enforcement of middle-class morality by public opinion, under conditions of popular enfranchisement. As he argues: “Where there is an ascendant class, a large proportion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority.”64 In “Considerations on Representative Government” he advocates a system of proportional representation for minorities, in order to prevent the dominance of class legislation.65 Even in a society falling short of perfection, however, Mill did not believe that one’s class position conclusively and inevitably determined character and opinions. Unlike Marx, he maintained that as long as people were susceptible to reason, their immediate self-interest could be overcome. Reason and sympathy also influence character, although within the basic context of class identity: “Men’s intellects and hearts have a large share in determining what sort of Conservatives or Liberals they will be; but it is their position (saving individual exceptions) which makes them Conservatives or Liberals.”66 As Wendy Donner points out, Mill accepted that people are provided with the basic material of character, through genetic inheritance and environmental factors, but nevertheless through their own self-development can pursue a range of possible lifestyles.67 This parallels the process of self-identification I discussed in chapter one. Persons are ascribed to groups, but can choose whether or not to identify with them. Group membership was not thus inescapably determining of character, and its transcendence by reason was, Mill argued, a sign of progress. In fact, the use of reason critically to evaluate one’s class assumptions was ultimately both a cause and effect of human progress. Mill argues strenuously for freedom in “On Liberty” on the grounds that it allows human beings to form their own opinions and shape their own characters. Each life becomes a Bildungsroman, its trajectory determined by its protagonist’s evaluations and choices.68 Mill’s discussion of individuality is a plea for the liberty of individuals to reject the opinion dominant in their communities, both for their own and the more general good: “Where, not the person’s own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and


quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.”69 While people would inevitably learn the traditions and customs of their community in youth, Mill argues that: It is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way. It is for him to find out what part of recorded experience is properly applicable to his own circumstances and character. The traditions and customs of other people are . . . evidence of what their experience has taught them . . . and, as such, have a claim to his deference: but in the first place, their experience may be too narrow; or they may not have interpreted it rightly. Secondly, their interpretation of experience may be correct, but unsuitable to him . . . . Thirdly, though the customs may be both good as customs and suitable to him, yet to conform to custom merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgement, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.70

Mill’s own experience is, appropriately enough, influential upon his thinking here: he indignantly rejects in his autobiography the suggestion (made by Thomas Carlyle and others) that he was a “manufactured man,” with opinions “stamped” upon him by his father and Bentham.71 He could recover from his early psychological crisis only by believing that he could reshape himself from a Benthamite Utilitarian. Thus he argues against what Robert Owen would term the “fatalist” theory of the determination of character by circumstance, that persons help to create their own characters, shaping the materials that are provided by their environment.72 Mill’s desire that class interests eventually be overcome by identification with the progressive interests of the community as a whole have led some of his critics to suggest that he envisages diversity springing from individual eccentricity and intellectual disagreement, rather than class- or group-based experience. While Mill did foresee a worrying homogenization as the result of future socialist reforms and the consequent elimination of class differences, it was clearly not the case under social conditions as they then existed. Moreover, class division and the struggles for power between social groups played an essential role in historical advancement. As he argues in “Considerations”: No community has ever long continued progressive, but while a conflict was going on between the strongest power in the community and some rival power; between the spiritual and temporal authorities; the military or territorial and the industrious classes; the king and the people; the orthodox and

48 / post-nationalist liberal pluralism religious reformers. When the victory on either side was so complete as to put an end to the strife, and no other conflict took its place, first stagnation followed and then decay.73

Class conflict was not, as Ashcraft points out, the only mechanism driving diversity of opinion. But it was the most powerful in Mill’s view, and while he advocated reforms aimed at eliminating classes, he retained some ambivalence about socialism, fearing that its achievement would lead inevitably to social stagnation.74 In the meantime, competent agents could not completely escape the influences of their culture and class, although through education they could learn to become critical and rational, and thus partially to transcend their particularity. Mill’s liberalism thus incorporates both sociality and individuality by placing the individual in a constructing social context of class and group membership, while avoiding the constraints of determinism. Education and the exercise of reason allow for the assertion of individuality unconstrained by group membership. But while such individuality, accompanied by recognition of the common good, is the end of human progress, until its achievement, the plural basis of social identification means that classes must specifically be represented in government in order that members’ interests properly be taken into account. From Pluralist Society to Harmonious Community Most nineteenth-century liberals from Mill onward subscribed to what Gerald Gaus describes as the “interactionism” model of individual psychological development, according to which: “personality is the outcome of an interplay of innate tendencies and environmental conditions.”75 But where Mill had ascribed significant influence to the culture of subnational groups, later liberals understood culture or social environment as the product of a national community, which increasingly came to be viewed as the central locus of political identification. Class identity assumed less importance as a result of two political developments. One was the increasing domination of party politics in Britain by the question of the legitimacy of state intervention in social and economic affairs.76 The second was the rise of nationalist movements in Europe, espousing principles of liberation and self-determination that appealed strongly to British liberals.77 Many were very sympathetic to the national struggles for independence waged during the second half of the nineteenth century by Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Bohemians, and Poles, against the imperial domination of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, or papal control. Leaders of the Italian Risorgimento such as Mazzini,


Cavour, and Garibaldi were especially popular with intellectuals and artists because of their combination of liberatory idealism and Italy’s classical heritage. Mazzini in particular shared with Victorian liberals the belief that politics were, as Ian Bradley puts it, “a moral crusade led by visionaries rather than just a narrow bid for power by a group of calculating politicians.”78 Victorian liberal support for national self-determination emphasized the claims of autonomy and progress that were made on the part of newly emergent peoples. They took as their theoretical basis Mill’s incorporation into liberal thought of the German Romantic concept of individuality as individual uniqueness, originality, and self-realization. In German Romanticism, as Steven Lukes describes, personal individualism is transformed into “an organic and nationalistic theory of community, each unique and self-sufficient,” and in which the individual found true selfexpression.79 The individuality of the person leads to that of the nation or state. Thus, for Hegel, the nation-state is no longer the product of a rational contract between individuals, but rather a spiritual entity, the perfect manifestation of Geist in history. Individuals can realize themselves only through identification with this perfect whole, expressed through the social and political institutions of the state.80 If Mill introduced German Romantic individuality into British liberal thought, it is T.H. Green who incorporated into it the Hegelian vision of the state. Liberal views on the legitimacy of state intervention were greatly influenced by Green’s philosophical Idealism and his conceptions of the common good and the role of the state. As might be expected in a philosophy based on the premise that individuals could express themselves fully only through membership in the unified whole of national society, there is little recognition in Green’s work of the political importance of subnational group membership, or of the role of power relations between groups in the construction of identities. Central to Green’s argument in the Prolegomena to Ethics is the claim that human personality can exist only in the context of society: “Only through society is anyone enabled to give that effect to the idea of himself as the object of his actions.”81 Society is thus “the condition of development of a personality.”82 Within the social context, people regard each other as ends in themselves, and are capable of conceiving a common good, which takes into account the goods of others (as others are all equal ends). The “unity of self- consciousness,” which is the common good, is the basis of community.83 But Green also places strong emphasis on active selfdevelopment through free choice. Individuals could realize their potentialities only within a social context in which they were guaranteed liberty.84 By “society,” Green generally means the national community, although he maintains that the feeling of commonality could, and logically should,


be extended to all mankind. He observes that more and more people have over the course of history been included in the group to which such mutual recognition is extended.85 Nevertheless, the national community alone is capable of generating affective ties similar to those of the family: “ties derived from a common dwelling-place with its associations, from common memories, traditions and customs, and from the common ways of thinking and feeling which a common language and still more a common literature embodies.”86 Within the nation, any particularity of feeling is ascribed to “the antagonism of the natural to the spiritual man.”87 Particular preference could thus be dismissed as selfish or animal—distinct from the historically progressive embodiment of reason in man and human society. Not surprisingly, Green was dismissive of the role of particular interests in political life. The metaphysical basis for community renders group or class interests even more sinister and suspect for Green than they had been for Mill. As “the true good is good for all men and good for them all in virtue of the same nature and capacity,” it must entail no competition of interests.88 Nor did the apprehension of a good depend upon one’s socially constructed experience as a member of a particular group. Group membership produced no distinctive experience nor conferred any particular understanding. Consequently, for Green, the interests and perspective of women are able to be represented adequately by men: The formation of family life supposes that in the conception of his own good to which a man seeks to give reality there is included a conception of the wellbeing of others, connected with him by sexual relations or by relations which arise out of these. He must conceive of the well-being of others as a permanent object bound up with his own, and the interest in it as thus conceived must be a motive to him over and above any succession of passing desires to obtain pleasure from, or give pleasure to, the others; otherwise there would be nothing to lead to the establishment of a household, in which the wants of the wife or wives are permanently provided for . . .89

While Green recognizes that voluntary associations are an important part of civil society, as they were for Hegel, nevertheless they have for him little moral significance. The state is the most important institution because it encompasses all voluntary associations, which embody more limited purposes. As Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant conclude in their study of Idealist thought: “The state as an institution representing the common purpose did not demand an absolute conformity. Yet it tended to overcome, insofar as it approached any perfection, the separation of interests.”90 The social good, embodied in national society, is opposed to particular interests. This was an old liberal concern in a new philosophical context: in discussing the differences between earlier liberals and contemporary reformers, Green argues


that all political reformers are pursuing “the same old cause of social good against class interests, for which, under altered names, liberals are fighting now as they were fifty years ago.”91 The collectivist New liberals, who wrote around the turn of the century, were openly critical of the Idealists’ metaphysical view of the state. Nevertheless, as we shall see, they retained the Idealist concept of national society as both the source of personality and the field of political action. In his critique of Idealist Bernard Bosanquet’s The Philosophical Theory of the State, New liberal L.T. Hobhouse refers to the danger of regarding society as an entity distinct from the individuals composing it, incorporated into which persons lose their individual identity: Having reached the conception of a superpersonal entity in which individuals are submerged, we are inclined to look for this entity, not in all the varied forms of associated life which intersect and cut across one another, but in some particular form of association which seems to include the rest and so to present itself as a whole to which the individual must belong as an element. This entity, idealist writers have found in the state.92

Hobhouse argues that the state could not singly represent the complexities of human sociality: while human interests are fundamentally social, they manifest themselves irreducibly in the complete social fabric. The realm of the social encompasses for Hobhouse nongovernmental institutions such as the Church, the “republic of letters,” and the world economy. The state is simply “one among many forms of human association for the maintenance and improvement of life,”93 and Hobhouse regarded its confusion with society as a whole by the Idealists as “the central fallacy of the metaphysical theory of the state.”94 Hobhouse means mostly voluntary associations when he refers to the complexity of society. He divides society as a general category into three types: the “effective kindred,” or family, which is a structure “of a definite and durable kind deeply rooted in human impulses”; the community or “entire society occupying a certain territory as long as it is united by certain connective relations that do not extend beyond its borders”; and the association, which comprises “all societies which are based on specific purposes and needs of man.”95 Sociology, he thought, ought to be concerned with the community, as the association is “by definition hardly capable of an independent life, but requires either a community or communities as its background and support.”96 Thus a distinction is established between voluntary associations and communities of fate, or ascription. Whereas a community in its highest form will embrace all the mutually consistent purposes of individuals, the fundamental characteristic of an association is that it reflects and pursues


only partial interests. Associations for Hobhouse resemble individuals: “centres of independent life with interests of their own, in the pursuit of which they impinge on one another, crossing each others’ paths.”97 A community, by contrast, must incorporate a degree of harmonization of personality and interests. Hobhouse does refer to social groups in which membership is by ascription, rather than by choice, although he does not specifically confer upon them the status of community. In criticizing Bosanquet’s reference to the official institutions of a community as “the standing interpretation of all the private wills that compose it,” he observes that individuals must often simply accept their assigned position in the social fabric. Thus: “wherever a community is governed by one class or one race, the remaining class or race is permanently in the position of having to take what it can get. To say that the institutions of such a society express the private will of the subject class is simply to add insult to injury.”98 In his work on social psychology, Hobhouse writes that sympathy between persons depends on three conditions: affection, comradeship, and mutual understanding. This last condition is considerably undermined by class barriers: Our relations are best regulated and most humane within the circle which we understand, among our friends, in regard to our own countrymen, and finally our race and colour . . . . As we get further away from intimate acquaintance, the sympathy weakens and gives place to indifference, tempered with suspicion, fear and nascent ill will.99

Class would seem then to function as community in the sense that it produces “connective relations” and incorporates some degree of “harmonization of personality and interests.” But class lacks of course the crucial requirement of location within territory.100 Hobhouse’s model of community, like Green’s, is nation-based. In fact, Hobhouse followed Green closely in his focus on the common good, although replacing the Idealist metaphysical state as spiritual entity with an organic totality. In spite of his delimitation of sympathy, his social model is one of class harmony, in which all classes work in concert like the parts of a living organism.101 Collini points out that while Hobhouse had a lifelong sympathy for the claims of labor as a class, he was opposed to sectional groups, believing that it was essential to liberalism, as opposed to socialism, to pursue the common good rather than class interests.102 It is through the complex and social manifestation of the common will, rather than the state, that the common good is to be realized. Neither he nor Green seemed to recognize that an individual or a social group might have an interest forming the source of a moral claim that conflicted with the common good.103 Both believed that human moral nature, in order to


be fulfilled, must depend upon a moral world that realized the fulfilment of others also. Thus self-development must inevitably contribute to the common good. As Collini observes, the contention that “man is a social being” is for Hobhouse a moral, rather than a sociological, claim, in spite of his recognition of a plurality of class interests in the critique of Bosanquet (and his own official academic position as a sociologist). Rights and duties are defined by the common good, and the individual good cannot conflict with the common. Thus a degree of harmony is explicit in social life, as it is between the functioning parts of a biological organism.104 Hobhouse’s dislike of particular interests, like that of Mill and Green, stemmed from his faith in the possibility of human moral progress. All three believed that if the working classes were educated and their social and economic conditions improved, they, like the middle classes, would be able to perceive the common good, rather than merely their own interests. But like Green and unlike Mill, Hobhouse drew no distinction between the ideal and the actually existing state of political affairs, and thus saw no need for the representation of the working class’s interests until they had transcended their class position. Where Mill explicitly addresses the effects of present class and social divisions on the construction of character, Hobhouse simply invokes the necessity for harmony rather than sectional selfishness. The Victorian opposition to “class legislation” and the pursuit of sectional interests was widely shared by New liberals, for whom the invocation of the common good meant suspicion of the organized interests of particular social groups. While they supported policies designed to improve the condition of the working classes, their intent was clearly to benefit the moral and social “organism” as a whole, rather than to give legitimate expression to class interests.105 Liberals active in journalism and political life, such as J.A. Hobson, Herbert Samuel, and Herbert Asquith, all reiterated the belief that individual and particular interests were subordinate to the common welfare or general will.106 This may explain the curious reluctance of many prominent liberals from the 1890s onward to support the movement for women’s suffrage. The relationship between liberals and the suffrage movement deteriorated further with the formation in the early twentieth century of the Women’s Social and Political Union, whose tactics were viewed by liberals as extremist and divisive.107 Bosanquet, the Idealist thinker and driving force behind the Charity Organization Society, was a partial exception to the prevalent suspicion of class identity. A strong voluntarist, Bosanquet has commonly been viewed as a strict individualist; nevertheless, he supported Guild Socialism and the development by members of the working class of their own ethos and culture. The views of the COS were echoed in the Majority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, published in 1909, which recognized


that the character of the poor reflected their social environment, but advocated more encouragement of self-help on the part of the poor by registered charities. This strategy has been seen by critics, notably, the Commission Minority, led by Beatrice Webb, as a refusal to recognize the structural social causes of poverty. But it did assign a more self-determining role to the poor than did the Minority Report, which recommended a comprehensive bureaucratic system of public assistance. Bosanquet strongly emphasized self-help and self-government on the part of the working classes, advocating an “ethical-pluralist democracy.”108 The “practical society” he supported was based on the division of society into convenient districts that were largely self-regulating and sustaining.109 The legacy of Idealism and New liberalism consisted overwhelmingly, however, of a critique of social inequality married uneasily with a dislike of class and group identification. The solutions to social problems lay, so liberals believed at the close of the nineteenth century, in the efforts both of individuals to realize their best selves and of states to foster this realization. It was only their views on the relative efficacy of state versus individual intervention that separated liberals from Fabian socialists. Such a view attached no particular importance to the working classes representing their own particular perspectives themselves. As both Christopher Kent and Christopher Harvie have shown, mid- to late-Victorian liberals, many of whom were attached to universities, believed that radical university intellectuals played a crucial role in political and social reform, by providing leadership to the “ordinary people,” who could be persuaded to accept the direction of their intellectual superiors.110 Where Mill had argued that because group membership shaped identity, group interests must be represented in political life, later liberals rejected the recognition of group status, transforming an incipient sociological liberalism into a normative theory. Groups were restricted to voluntary associations allowing for the expression of interests, however derived. While organizations such as trade unions were clearly related to communities of class (and it is only economic class that approaches the status of community for post-Millian theorists), liberals remained suspicious of any claims they made to represent a distinct class perspective and interests. This rejection of communities of identity set the stage for first-wave pluralism, which emerged in the early twentieth century. Like New liberalism, early pluralism denied the metaphysical state, but it rejected also the organic community, focusing instead on the role of voluntary associations. Conclusion The liberal moral pluralism I discussed in chapter one is testimony not simply to Mill’s concern with the individual’s freedom to adopt different


beliefs, but also to the insistence by his defenders that this concern drove his political theory. In the influential “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin describes Mill’s moral pluralism as the center of liberal philosophy.111 At the heart of modern liberalism, then, is moral pluralism tied to the voluntarist view of human autonomy which I discussed in chapter one. As Joseph Raz points out, moral pluralism is both the necessary precondition for this view of individuality and autonomy, and its result.112 But as I have shown, moral plurality only becomes the exclusive expression of social diversity in liberal thought after Mill. Mill himself was also concerned with sociological analysis, and with developing political principles and structures that were suited not to an ideal society, but to the particular conditions of Victorian Britain, with its class and gender divisions. His recognition of the role played by group membership in the construction of identity and interests led him to advocate the political representation of minorities whose interests could not adequately be represented by others, no matter how sympathetic, or intellectually advanced. It is only in the future, after socialist reforms, that the distinctions between classes would inevitably be reduced, allowing class members to identify a common interest and individuals freely to choose their own moral beliefs. While the ultimate goal of political development is thus a combination of individuality and the recognition by all of a common good, Mill insisted that particular goods be recognized fairly in the meantime. Mill assumes the social construction of individuality, but this is not, of course, a determinist view, in which individuals are the helpless bearers of ascribed identities. As we have seen, education, better socioeconomic opportunities, and the exercise of reason enable a person to reflect upon and shape her socialization, to assert her individuality, and under some circumstances to transcend her class or group membership. Mill’s is neither a strictly voluntarist nor a cognitive account of autonomy. He locates the source of second-order reflection upon our ends in the faculty of reason, but reason is developed by changes in class (or group) circumstances. Although Mill does not explicitly argue that it is our multiple and complex social memberships that enable us to reflect upon our socialization, his discussion of the multiple axes of social membership lays the foundations for it. While later liberals followed Mill in arguing that social environment shaped character, their understanding of both environment and personality was wholist rather than pluralist. Social environment became synonymous with national culture, and the only membership that came to matter politically was citizenship. Ironically, as liberals became more aware of the role of social and economic forces in shaping character and destiny, they paid less attention to the effects on individual identity of both class and group membership, and the power relations between groups. As I have argued, this was


due to both ideological and political factors: the adoption into British philosophy of a diluted Hegelian Idealism and the construction of a liberal defense against the militant class politics of the new Labour Party. It produced a state-centered politics of relentless harmonization, in which difference and diversity were at best relegated to the realm of interests and subsumed by the requirements of the common good. We can trace as a result the separation in liberal thought between nationality, subnational identity, interests, and moral views—all of which are linked at their analytical origin in Mill’s theory. Mill’s liberalism addresses the concerns of modern liberals that identity politics limits individual freedom: he argues for the recognition of the social group construction of identity, but also rejects a determinist view of social identity construction. Critics who see Mill as advocating social progress under the guidance of intellectual elites miss the importance he attaches to each individual’s reckoning with his or her social positioning. His argument that education and economic reform would allow people to escape the determining influence of their assigned group membership reflects his philosophy of historical progress, but it also constitutes an attempt to insert human will and agency into the process of social construction. It is this balance between social- and self-construction that speaks most closely to current debates about identity politics and their implications for the political process in pluralist societies. Theorists who support the claims of minority groups for recognition, but warn of the dangers of imposed identities, and insist upon the right of exit, reflect Mill’s approach.113 So, however, do those who argue that groups identified by their position in the social and economic power structure must represent themselves and participate fully in the political process. His argument that the working-class perspective is unique and essential to political debate is echoed today in deliberative democratic theorists’ support for the inclusion of marginalized minorities in the deliberative process (which I discuss in chapter five.)114 In Inclusion and Democracy, for example, Iris Young defends social group differentiation as an invaluable resource for democratic communication: Inclusion ought not to mean simply the formal and abstract equality of all members of the polity as citizens. It means explicitly acknowledging social differentiations and divisions and encouraging differently situated groups to give voice to their needs, interests, and perspectives on society in ways that meet conditions of reasonableness and publicity.115

More specifically, the policy of affirmative action may be defended on the Millian grounds that it rectifies historical exclusion and injustice, as well as provides for all the benefits of exposure to diversity in study and work.116


Although Mill’s legacy has been appropriated by both moral pluralists and multiculturalists today, in fact, he argues that moral pluralism cannot be separated from the relations between social groups, organized in structures of domination and subordination. Interests and moral views follow group socialization, and nationality is only one source of affiliation that shapes individual identity. We have seen how later liberals discounted all forms of cultural group identity below the level of the nation. In chapter three I examine this transformation of identity into interest groups and the rise of interest pluralism in liberal thinking about politics over the course of the twentieth century.


Chapter Three Interest Pluralisms and the Erasure of Social Identity

Moral pluralism has dominated liberal political philosophy, as we saw in the work of Rawls and other political liberals, but political scientists who take a more empirical approach tend to define pluralities rather in terms of interests. Both of these varieties of pluralism are, as we have seen, derived from Mill, although neither takes identity groups seriously, except for nationality, to which they assign a special role. In this chapter I trace the development of interest pluralism as the heir to the post-Millian rejection of identity. Divorced from its role in shaping personality, group membership had come to be understood by the close of the nineteenth century as the collective and voluntary expression of the interests of existing individuals, already fundamentally constructed by national membership. In these terms, group membership invoked older concerns in political philosophy concerning the status and power of factional interests. The first pluralist arguments I examine here saw interest groups as the essential expression of human personality. Individuals were bundles of interests, and even the state was merely one interest group amongst many, with no particular claim to absolute sovereignty. But the work of both Harold Laski and G.D.H. Cole also reveals from the earliest an acknowledgment of the special role played by class membership, as distinct from that of other groups, which threatens to undermine their model of interest-based pluralism. Eventually, the role of class membership in shaping identity came to be seen by both writers as more important than the expression of interests in voluntary associations. As a result, both theorists abandoned their pluralist arguments, and came to adopt more explicitly socialist versions of the statist arguments made by their collectivist liberal predecessors. When pluralism reemerged in American social science in the 1950s during the Cold War the normative argument against state sovereignty had disappeared, and did not reappear in pluralist thought until Paul Hirst’s associationalism, which I discuss in the final section of this chapter. But in


social science pluralism, which I examine in the second section of this chapter, the focus on interests rather than identity-constructing groups reemerged, along with the explicit relegation of identity to nationality, characteristic of late nineteenth-century liberalism. Identity is subsumed into interest. Before examining this process in detail, we must look in more detail at the historical relationship in liberal thought between identity and interests. Interest and Identity The relationship between interest and identity has been implied and assumed by political theorists, although rarely explicated. In the early modern period, both concepts were understood in individual and personal, rather than class or group terms. Thus, for both Locke and Hume, the problem of identity is one of the coherence of the individual self—for the former, across time, for the latter, across perceptions.1 Interest, as Albert Hirschman describes its origins, referred to the balance of passion by reason in each individual.2 To counter the anxiety that reason itself would prove powerful enough to countervail socially destructive passions, the concept of interest developed to denote passion directed by reason.3 Interest thus became integral to theories of human motivation and action. Hobbes, for example, redefined all the passions in terms of self-interest.4 By the eighteenth century, interest had come to refer to the desire for material wealth, and had accordingly acquired a derogatory connotation.5 As passion came to be viewed in a more positive light—as a creative force and the expression of human authenticity—the idea of a world governed by interest and the pursuit of wealth came to seem both limited and potentially damaging.6 At the same time, interest in its new economic sense came to refer not only to the good of the individual, but also to that of newly emergent and delineated economic classes. As I argued in chapter two, John Stuart Mill recognized class as the primary source of individual interest— because it also constituted the primary source of identity. The emergence of classes transformed both identity and interest, so that both came to be understood in terms of membership.7 For Mill, class interest could not be separated from identity: class members share interests because they share a group identity. Both were crucial to understanding human motivations—to focus only on identity would be to deny the social and political implications of socially constructed character, while to recognize only interests would fail to account for how those interests arose, and could be altered. As I argued in chapter two, liberal thought after Mill continued to assume the group derivation of interest, but narrowed the relevant group to national society. The early pluralists, as I point out later, for the most part, divorced interests

interest pluralisms / 61

from identity. In place of a “thick” conception of identity incorporating group membership and affiliation, American political science reverted to the “thin” self of the utilitarians’ economic man, according to which individuals were to be understood as the rational maximizers of their interests. In another incarnation of possessive individualism, persons became defined or identified in terms of the interests they possessed.8 One solution to the problem of identity and interest is to acknowledge their mutually dependent relationship, while maintaining that both are matters of free choice. This is the approach adopted by Paul Hirst in his associationalist theory.9 Hirst argues that recognition and legitimization of the fragmentation of identity in modern liberal democracies must comprise the basis of government. As I discuss later, he proposes a system of radically decentralized governance, in which resource allocation and management become the responsibility of voluntary associations that represent the diversity of human interests. Identity and Interests in Early Pluralism The political pluralism that enjoyed a brief vogue in English political theory in the early twentieth century arose in reaction to the special status of state authority characteristic of both Idealism and collectivist New liberalism, as we saw in chapter two. In terms of public policy, both these schools of thought legitimized the extension of state authority over individual action (of course to different degrees) on the basis of the individual’s moral rights to full development and expression. The chief concern of both collectivist liberals and Fabian socialists was to identify and promote the “proper” level of state (bureaucratic) intervention required to achieve the common good. The essential problem of politics, its definitional assumption, remained the relationship between the individual and the state. Pluralist writers aimed to avoid the state–individual dichotomy by emphasizing civil society—understood as group life at the substate level. While they agreed with earlier liberals that individual freedom was expressed in sociality, they assigned only a limited role to the state as a social organization. The state played no special role in realizing the moral self-development of individuals; it was rather only one of many groups that performed this function by expressing essential human sociality. Thus, notwithstanding its legal claims, the state was morally entitled neither to absolute sovereignty over other groups nor to the ultimate obligation of individuals. English pluralism was a diverse school, whose theorists wrote from positions of political commitment to a range of specific social groups, from churches to trades union, and from discursive traditions as diverse as legal history and syndicalism. Many of their concerns are peripheral to the


ontological issues I am pursuing here. But two of the most important pluralists, Laski and Cole were both self-identified socialists who shared liberal preoccupations with individual freedom and rights to self-development and self-government as well as opposition to absolute state power.10 Both went on specifically to reject liberal answers to the problems of class inequality in their later writings. As I show here, the work of Laski and Cole reveals even more clearly the ambiguous status of groups, as both associations and communities, that was barely acknowledged by Hobhouse. Mostly, the pluralists are voluntarists who assume prior, given persons with a set of impulses or desires, who must be free to participate in a range of organizations, in order both to express and develop themselves. Their insistence upon a central and unsocialized core of the self reflects long-standing liberal concerns about determinism. The pluralists thus follow one important strand of Mill’s thinking about the self-authorizing and self-developing individual. But in their views on class, another and contradictory picture emerges: the subject is informed and constructed by the very groups or associations to which he or she belongs. This in turn reflects implicitly Mill’s thinking about the effects of group membership. Central to Laski’s pluralism is his belief in the “ethical significance of personality”—the importance of the moral freedom and authority of the individual. He rejects state sovereignty over other associations because it is necessarily incompatible with authentic human freedom—as freedom entails the expression of character in its full complexity. Like both the Idealists and collectivists, Laski saw persons as social beings; unlike them, he argues that sociality is multiply expressed and cannot be contained by any unified community. Contrary to Idealist claims, there is no single “true self ” within each person, but rather a variety of impulses, desires and interests. Laski describes the inherent plurality of human personality in Lockean and Humean terms as a “bundle of impulses,”11 which act together as a total personality. These diverse impulses or interests are expressed through membership in a range of social groups. The complex structure of society thus mirrors the structure of personality, and personal allegiance cannot be unified any more than can society. In summary: “No discussion of social organization is satisfactory which does not take account of the inherently plural character of the human personality.”12 There is, according to Laski, no Hegelian ideal form nor Rousseaunian general will embodied in the state—rather, it comprises an “inexpugnable variety of human wills.”13 At the center of things is the individual, who is linked to a variety of associations including the state, “to which his personality attracts him.”14 The ultimate good is not to be obtained, as Hobhouse claims, by the operation in harmony of various groups. Instead, because of


the complexity of human interests, wills are constantly in conflict. Like Mill, Laski believed that a plurality of ideas and values would lead to progress, through a process of selection resulting from debate and disagreement. In fact, he is the first liberal since Mill to value difference and discord in politics so positively. The Idealists and New liberals, while recognizing plurality, had tended to focus upon the goal of ultimate harmonization of interests and wills. Laski’s concept of associations as representing interests and impulses seems to suggest that the plural nature of the person is directed, coordinated, and controlled by a given and pre- social core of identity. Indeed, he insists that there is one aspect of each person that is “ultimately unassimilable,” and that crucially required—as did the Romantic self—privacy and isolation.15 On the subject of this private and a-social center, he writes: That intimate, unabsorbed personality is the thing he seeks to satisfy by the system of relationships into which he enters. Its will is compounded, doubtless, of the innumerable single acts he performs. It yet stands over and above them and judges not merely the acts, but the society they influence, by the degree to which they produce a satisfied and co-ordinated life as the result.16

The individual thus is not absorbed by any of the many associations with which he or she comes into contact, remaining instead a “center from which there radiate outward lines of contact with the groups to which his experience calls him.”17 But while this suggests that it is pre-given interests that lead to group membership, Laski also asserts that some interests are in part produced by group membership. In The Foundations of Sovereignty he argues that membership of groups such as churches or classes can give rise to interests that are then represented by these very groups—or in the case of class, by the organized entities that arise out of them, such as trade unions and parties.18 Laski even moves from seeing groups as constructing interests to expressing them in the course of a single paragraph: “For man is so essentially an associative animal that his nature is largely determined by the relationships thus formed. The churches express his feeling that he has need of religion. His desire for conversation and the newspapers results in the establishment of clubs.”19 A mutually constructing relationship is set up: churches construct religiosity, which is then expressed in church membership. This process is consistent with what I described earlier as the constructing influence of identity groups, and membership in the voluntary associations that arise out of them. Laski’s ambiguous group ontology in part reflects his own shift from a metaphysical conception of associations, which is influenced by von Gierke


and Maitland, to a pragmatic view.20 Having abandoned a belief in real corporate personality, Laski seems uncertain about the degree to which a group that has no real personality of its own can nevertheless influence the personality of its members. Another source of confusion is his tendency to gloss over the differences between social groupings. While Laski refers in his writings to a wide range of groups, he acknowledges implicitly that identity is affected more by membership in some than in others. His plural theory of personality leads him to stress the multiplicity of associations through which interests are expressed—from golf clubs and research institutes to trade unions and churches. Laski focuses on the purely voluntary societies, especially in his discussion of the rights of associations to internal autonomy. Groups such as churches, unions, and national societies are clearly different from these, however, in that their membership is often not voluntary—they either are themselves, or represent groups (in the case of unions) into which people are born as members before they can even be said to possess a will.21 It is these involuntary groups that are, Laski suggests, most clearly involved in the construction of individual identity and interests. While earlier liberals had focused on the role of national membership, Laski argues that other groups also contributed to shaping identity. In Authority in the Modern State, he remarks that: “it may be true that man’s nature is determined by the environment in which he lives, but that environment is not merely a state creation.”22 In fact, class structure is the crucial environmental factor. Like Mill, Laski accepts that social and economic position produces specific interests: “The political opinions of men are largely determined by their industrial situation.”23 He also seems to have had class in mind when he argues in the Grammar that the citizen is born into a society, “the institutions of which are in large part beyond his individual control. He learns that they will inevitably shape at least the general outlines of what fortune he may encounter . . . [Individuals] set their will by the wills of institutions they rarely explore.”24 In his later work, as Laski explicitly moved away from pluralism toward a more critical analysis of state power, the social construction of identity and interests emerges in his writing as a clearer process. In his discussion of the relationship between economic power hierarchies and state power in The State in Theory and Practice, he argues that the class struggle takes place between groups and ideologies which each group develops as “the expression of its idea of good which is born of the experience it infers from its position.”25 The values of the group shape those of persons born into it: It is natural for a man to take on the colour of his environment. That is the experience he knows. The values it provokes come to him coloured with emotions, hopes and fears, which persuade him, without knowing it, to

interest pluralisms / 65 regard them as necessary to the social good . . . . Those who control an environment set the ideological quality of its life in a way, and to a degree, which involves hardly less those over whom they rule than it involves themselves. The rarest social type is the man who can transcend these familiar habitations.26

Laski had come to believe that it was economic organization that produced the most historically important groups. But at this point, as he abandoned pluralism, he shifted also from an interest in the representation of class groups to explore the capacities and duties of the state. His later writings reflect a more orthodox and state-centered critique of capitalist economic structures—a socialist version of the same issues that had preoccupied earlier collectivist liberals. For Laski, as for Cole, as I show later, pluralism was stripped of its nuances and came to be associated only with voluntary associations. Thus it appeared irrelevant to the increasingly central political issue of the role of the state in ensuring liberty and equality. Like those of Laski, Cole’s pluralist writings reveal an ambiguity about the role of social groups in constructing identity. Cole’s pluralism took the form of Guild Socialism—a political program that combined a pluralist attack on state sovereignty with an emphasis on industrial action, and proposed the decentralization of political authority into a network of democratic industrial associations. Cole argues that associations represent the “speciality of function” of the general will, which is no longer (as it had been for Rousseau) capable of expression solely through the state, nor through any single social organization.27 Society comprises “a wider complex of institutions [than simply the state] which resemble one another throughout only as being one and all expressions of man’s associative will.”28 The state’s role is simply “to represent those elements in common life which are best represented on a geographical basis.”29 As for Laski, it is individual freedom and self-government that are crucially at stake for Cole, and anxieties about freedom and determinism that shape his ontology. He contends that no individual personality could be represented as a whole and still remain free; therefore the only kind of representation compatible with democracy is the representation of interests or functions.30 Cole insists that there exists a central, “universal” aspect to the individual. Individual will could not fully be expressed as any one function or interest, and thus neither the state nor any other association was able to subsume identity. Each person owes “a number of relative and limited loyalties, of varying importance and intensity, but not essentially differing in kind.” It was up to individuals to decide where their ultimate loyalty lay in cases of conflict.31 While individual will forms the irreducible moral center of the social system, Cole acknowledges explicitly that identity is at least partly produced


in a communal context: “men do not make communities—they are born and bred into them.”32 Although his pluralism is premised upon central differences between community, society, and association, these distinctions fail to remain stable. Community is defined as being both composed of and prior to individuals, nonvoluntary and premised upon a common purpose, rather than a specific interest.33 It comprises: a complex of social life, a complex including a number of human beings living together under conditions of social relationship, bound together by a common, however constantly changing, stock of conventions, customs and traditions, and conscious to some extent of common social objects and interests. [Community] is essentially a subjective term, and the reality of it consists in the consciousness of it among members.34

As a category, community includes any groups that are largely selfsustaining, and that, importantly, cover the totality of members’ lives.35 Cole generally defines it as synonymous with the nation-state. Communities play a central role in constructing the characters of members: “If environment does not, as Robert Owen thought, make character in an absolute sense, it does direct and divert character into divergent forms of expression. Environment, in modern Societies at least, is very largely a matter of social mechanism.”36 Associations are differentiated by their voluntary and particular nature from the communities into which people are born. Cole writes that people belong to communities, to associations they are only connected.37 Associations spring up to satisfy a variety of human wants, and consist of “any group of persons pursuing a common purpose or system, or aggregation of purposes by a course of cooperative action extending beyond a single act, and for this purpose agreeing together upon certain methods of procedure and laying down . . . rules for common action.”38 They include trade unions, churches, and social clubs, but also “institutional groups” such as husbands and property owners. All forms of association express and embody the wills of the individuals who belong to them.39 For all his careful typology distinguishing communities from associations on the basis of the interests they represent and the ways in which they function, Cole fails to maintain a clear distinction between them. This is apparent in his discussion of “several” and “associative” desires, which are expressed in group membership. “Several wants” can be enjoyed separately, while “associative wants” can be enjoyed only in conjunction with others, if the group cooperates as a whole.40 Associations based on associative wants tend to produce a feeling of community among members. Cole argues that this communal spirit renders such groups “more a vital part of the structure


of Society,” because there is at least a prima facie case that fulfilment of an associative want will be in the general interest.41 Cole has the organized labor movement in mind here, as the most significant example of a group that functions partly as community. Such organizations are the most socially and economically important for Cole, though he, like Laski, acknowledges a plethora of associations. Industrial and economic organization is where the “maximum amount of human energy and will tends to flow,” and consequently, the most active and socially important associations are class-based, from the House of Lords and the established Church to the trade unions, workers’ clubs, and friendly societies.42 But Cole suggests further that the “common object” and spirit that are essential to community in fact emerge in class groups: “Thus, the energy and goodwill which ought to flow into the common service are necessarily diverted into the [class] struggle. Instead of seeking the good of one another, we seek perforce the good of a particular social class.”43 Certainly, members of a class share “a way of living together,” as well as “sentiments, ideas and traditions,” all of which Cole defines as essential to community. In the Social Theory, although he clearly defines trade unions as associations, Cole comments that classes themselves may also constitute communities, including free association and a “communal object,” and providing a complete socialization for their members.44 Class membership like national society, shapes and influences individual identity. Having acknowledged that social organization is largely responsible for individual character,45 Cole is ultimately unable to draw a line between class and national groups, and thus the distinction between community and association blurs. The Legacy of Early Pluralism The early pluralists had been most concerned to rehabilitate interests by rejecting any special connection, metaphysical or otherwise, between the individual and the state. Where collectivist liberals had argued that identity was shaped by national membership, Laski posited a pre-social core of identity, prior to those interests that were expressed in a range of group affiliations, including citizenship. In a reversal of collectivist liberalism, even national identity was subordinated to interests. Cole conceded that membership in the national community shaped identity; nevertheless, identity must be expressed as a diversity of interests, in a range of associations. Both Laski and Cole, however, also conceded that affiliation with some substate groups functioned in the same way as national membership and substantially shaped identity and interests. Both theorists found it impossible to treat class membership as voluntary, and simply expressive of some given interest, and both eventually rejected liberalism and pluralism to develop


explicitly socialist theories of state intervention to remedy class inequalities. The link between pluralism and progressivist social criticism was subsequently broken. Laski and Cole rejected pluralism, rather than recasting it, as Mill had done, as a theory of the plural construction of identity. The foundation was thus laid for our contemporary separation between identity, interests, and moral views, linked at their origin in Mill’s thought, but clearly disarticulated by the time the pluralists wrote. Laski and Cole distinguished interest from identity pluralism, and assigned the greater weight to the former; while they allow for identity pluralism in the form of class, they are unable to explain the relationship between interest and identity pluralism. Once the two most publicly prominent of its advocates had abandoned their commitment to pluralism, the doctrine faded quickly from British political discourse. Modern critics of the early pluralists have concluded that the program failed to establish itself in the political arena because of both the growing power of the state in the early years of this century, and the preoccupation of progressive political thinkers with collectivist socialism.46 Cole and Laski advocated a stronger role for the state in their later socialist writings; both perceived that the social and economic inequalities produced as a result of class structure and the workings of capitalism were so farreaching that they both undermined and overwhelmed associational plurality. At the same time, the British Labour Party rejected the industrial democracy model of Guild Socialism, embracing instead state ownership and planning and the state provision of new public services. The power and sovereignty of the state, newly expanded as a result of the First World War, over the claims of organized labor, were reasserted in the General Strike of 1926. The market crash in 1929 and subsequent depression prompted the Left to demand increased state action.47 As a result of these developments, the fundamental debate in both the academic and public discourses of political theory shifted to that between proponents of individualism on the one hand, and state power on the other. When Friedrich Hayek directed his attack against social planning in The Road to Serfdom in 1944, he identified as the single opposition of politics individualism versus collectivism, and defined as essential to socialist collectivism the belief that all human activities ought to be centrally directed and organized according to a single blueprint.48 Hayek went on to accuse non-centralist forms of socialist organization of the same failings as state socialism. For example, far from enhancing freedom, particular organized groups such as trade unions functioned only to oppress individuals, both members and nonmembers alike.49 After the Second World War, Britain’s Labour government under Clement Attlee implemented an extensive program of publicly provided social services, thus further committing the Left to a state-sponsored version of social progress.


In the United States, however, pluralism became associated with scientism and was transformed into a powerfully influential empirical theory of politics. Laski’s work was popular and influential in the United States in the early twentieth century, to the extent that pluralism threatened to displace the sovereignty of the state in American political theory during the 1920s. In debates over the role of the state, pluralism was presented as “critical political theory,” linked with a scientific approach to politics and a progressive political platform, and directed against a conservative political theory of statism.50 During the 1930s, the debate between pluralism and statism was overtaken by theorists’ concern to explicate liberal democracy as an alternative to fascist and communist totalitarianism. Pluralism’s focus on interest groups became subsumed into a theory of liberal democracy that viewed the conflicts and compromises between group interests in terms of their effects upon order and the public good. As John Gunnell summarizes this shift in his account of political theory at the time: “There was, after all, a functional whole behind the diversity of the parts. This was increasingly presented explicitly as an alternative to totalitarianism.”51 The group theory of politics, emptied of the critique of state sovereignty central to early pluralism, had become the dominant paradigm for liberal democracy. Empirical and normative democratic theory converged around pluralism in the analysis of American social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s. American social science pluralism was predicated on an ontology similar to that of Laski and Cole: people are inherently social, the possessors of interests, and tend to form associations to express those several interests. Robert Dahl’s theory of government as polyarchy was grounded in a Madisonian view of the American political process. It was designed both to explain the workings of that process, and to legitimize it against those who argued that politics was determined by the struggle over the distribution of resources between classes or elites.52 I argue later that where the early pluralists recognized that identity, as well as interest, could be constructed by group membership, social science pluralism assumed a primary national identity as the context within which a diversity of interests engaged in politics. It has thus been unable to relate interests to complex identity, and to speak to the concerns about identity pluralism that have dominated American political discourse of late. Interest Pluralism and Fears of Cultural Fragmentation The fundamental assumption of American liberal pluralism is that an inevitable plurality of human interests produces a plurality of associations that represent them, and this in turn leads to constant and implicitly equalizing competition in politics. Associational plurality is an essential


component of Robert Dahl’s concept of polyarchy as a stable form of government. In a recent formulation, he describes the “effectively enforced right” of citizens to “form and join autonomous associations, including political associations, such as political parties and interest groups, that attempt to influence the government by competing in elections and by other peaceful means.”53 But this competition can only take place within a stable context of the fundamental common identity of participants. In response to the influence of identity politics concerns on the political landscape in recent years, Dahl has recently distinguished interest group pluralism from “subcultural pluralism”—a phenomenon that undermines, rather than ensures the stability of government. While polyarchy requires that the competitive process be open to excluded groups that can “appeal to the logic of equality in order to justify their admission into political life,”54 groups must recognize a shared “way of life” and values. Their members must share the same fundamental identity.55 This cannot apply to subcultures that are, Dahl argues, typically formed around ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or regional differences and shared historical experience or ancestral myths: The stronger and more distinctive a subculture, the more its members identify and interact with one another, and the less they identify and interact with non-members. In extreme cases, most members of a subculture live out their lives in nearly total isolation from nonmembers. They comprise a separate nation within the country. Marriage, friendships, play, sports, commensalism, festivals, education, ceremonial occasions, religious activities, even economic tasks take place more or less exclusively among members of the subculture.56

Conflicts between subcultures, unlike those between interest groups, threaten the underlying commitment of members to the community and the state. It’s important to note two points in conclusion here, the first of which is Dahl’s reliance on the language of nationalism. So fundamental is his commitment to national identity as primary that Dahl can only characterize other communal sources of identity in national terms. Thus other groups threaten to comprise “a separate nation within the state.” Second, Dahl understands the nation and national culture to be monolithic, in that all its members participate in the same nationally defined basic cultural rituals and practices. Subcultures are significant for Dahl only if they are in practice exclusive. In this light, it’s not surprising that he concludes that the stability of polyarchy cannot be maintained when conflicts strike so deep as to call for the sacrifice of identities and ways of life.57 In Dahl’s model, interest pluralism and the unitary identity of the nation reinforce each other and present a united front against pluralist models of identity construction and


politics. In effect, Dahl’s assumption of shared identity depoliticizes identity in the same way that the political liberals I discussed in chapter one do: both argue that the real business of politics takes place once questions of identity have been settled in the private sphere.

Associationalism: Embracing Radical Decentralization Paul Hirst carries the logic of social science interest pluralism to more radical conclusions in his proposed system of associational democracy. Whereas Dahl’s interest pluralism attempts to explain and legitimize the operation of the existing American political process, Hirst deploys it as a basis from which to argue for new political arrangements. As he points out, modern societies are pluralistic insofar as the interests and objectives of individuals and the social groups they join are concerned, but not in their dominant forms of service provision. Hirst goes on to argue that the decentralization of resource and service distribution to the level of voluntary associations would allow for both free individual choice and more efficient allocation.58 Associations would provide services, and people would chose which groups they wished to join for a particular service. Hirst justifies his proposals on the grounds that current attempts on the part of the state to deal with social and cultural pluralism (usually by way of centrally administered policies and programs promoting multiculturalism) are strategies that: “satisfy no community and at worst degenerate into a decultured pap.”59 American interest pluralism offers no solution, as it ignores the dangers inherent in the combination of pluralistic political competition and highly centralized states. These are: that powerful groups will capture the state and seek to advantage themselves to the detriment of the public interest; that key policy issues which affect everyone will be highjacked by powerful groups; and that the implementation of consistent policy will become impossible as power shifts between groups.60 Finally, Hirst argues that individual liberty and human welfare are best served when as many of the affairs of society as possible are managed by voluntary and selfgoverning associations. Hirst concludes that the appropriate method of dealing with tensions between communities, as well as empowering the poor and excluded is not the traditional Left-liberal strategy of extension of government bureaucracy, but rather the decentralization of political control and resource distribution to the level of the local group. In practical terms, this means the governance of social affairs through voluntary associations— a wide range of political and social groups—through which individuals could build their own social worlds in civil society.61 The attenuated role of the state would be to protect and, if necessary, fund these associations.


Associative democracy is designed to accommodate what communitarian strategies aim to overcome. Communitarianism proposes national solidarity as the solution to social fragmentation, emphasizing the duties and virtues of active citizenship and popular participation in community politics. This approach, Hirst argues, is ill-suited to a pluralist society in which particular groups follow increasingly divergent objectives: the new republican idea of restoring a more communal and committed politics is ill-adapted to current circumstances. It re-emphasizes the idea of a single, effectively self-governing political community at the very moment when the nation state is being undermined and a complex multi-focal politics is developing. Insofar as the new republicans accept existing representative democratic institutions, then they are stuck with the very real limitations that those institutions impose on governmental accountability and citizen participation . . . . Citizens need a political community that will enable them to be different, and not one that exhorts them to be the same.62

As Hirst continues, while associative democracy shares the focus on civil society and the new social movements increasingly popular among leftist theorists since the collapse of communism, it rejects both the oppositional paradigm of the state versus civil society, and the assumption that the role of social movements and groups is to rejuvenate a national politics.63 In Hirst’s model, while associations function as a supplement to liberal representative democracy, their purpose is neither to change the direction of the state, nor to capture it. They constitute rather the primary means of democratic governance and of organizing social life. The state becomes a secondary association that ensures peace between other associations and protects the rights of individuals, while providing also the mechanisms of public financing.64 Unlike some early pluralists, Hirst is careful to disclaim any metaphysical basis for group rights. He dismisses the suggestion that humans have any natural or inherent propensity to associate, and concludes from this that internal associations are not justified in making stronger claims upon members than those made by the compulsory state. Nor do they have real corporate personalities independent of their members as individuals.65 Rather than offering a critique of individualism, associationalism is in fact based upon the same central premise of individual freedom: groups are organizations rationally created by the free wills and intelligent choices of individuals. People associate voluntarily in order to exercise certain freedoms that they cannot exercise alone. Thus by associating, they enable their own further development. The ontology underlying this is clearly the same as that developed by Cole and Laski in their earlier writings, and shared by later American interest pluralists: persons are the possessors of interests and moral views, the derivation of which is prior and irrelevant to theory.


Given his insistence upon individualism, it is not surprising that Hirst makes a crucial distinction between communities of choice—voluntary associations that allow the right of exit—and communities of fate, into which people are born, and which they are unable to enter and exit voluntarily.66 The former are expressive of interests, the latter, of the given nature of identity; they “bind their members by limiting their individuation in the interests of a pre-written community ‘script’ of conduct and belief.”67 Hirst argues strongly for limiting rights of recognition under pluralism to voluntary communities of choice. In fact, it is only if the decentralization of resource distribution is limited to these kinds of communities that it will work at all; otherwise, group competition would become too socially disruptive. Hirst is suspicious of identity politics in any form, contending that in a multicultural society with conflicting identities, and where communities function as identities, the public sphere and the freedoms of civil society become nothing more than a medium for different groups to seek to capture public power for their own purposes.68 Underlying Hirst’s suspicions is his assumption that “real” community can only arise out of voluntary association. “Communities of fate” are not really communities at all, as they are, he argues, created and sustained by force and popular pressure. The state is an important example of a community of fate, membership in which is enforced by law. Others, Hirst argues, include classes, ethnic and religious groups, all of which are “ideological categories that rely upon forms of social closure to convert them into communities.”69 Such communities are built and enforced around apparently neutral and objective differences in individual circumstances. While differences in, for example, wealth and social status have, as Hirst admits, objective existence, classes came to exist only because “certain social forces, political parties or trade unions” claimed themselves to be the primary identification for their members, and alleged that they could only overcome such objective differences collectively. Here Hirst acknowledges that “fate” is not, as might be thought, natural or inevitable, but rather a matter of social definition and ascription, as I have shown earlier. But where identity politics theorists argue that a sense of community membership that influences identity can nevertheless arise out of ascribed membership, Hirst concludes that the contribution of such communities to the construction of identity is in fact a falsifying one. The compulsion to belong is “primarily internalized by the individual and amounts to denying any identity or experience inconsistent with the community.”70 This dismissal raises two problems: first, Hirst assumes that community membership must be exclusive, and second and more importantly, he assumes that identity is already given and fixed prior to assigned membership, which then falsifies “real identity.” But from where is this


“real” identity derived? We can only conclude from Hirst’s argument that group membership is irrelevant in constructing identity. By insisting that groups like classes are held together only by social coercion, and that the only true communities are voluntary, Hirst ignores the ways in which objective circumstances influence subjective consciousness.71 This requires him to assume that all associations function like the railway season ticket holders’ association and other purely single interest groups that make little impact upon self-consciousness. Not only does he thus dismiss the importance of class, gender, or racial membership as forms of expression of human sociality, but he also fails to account for the complex relationship between “given-ness” and “chosen-ness” in many associations. Voluntary associations such as trade unions do represent interests, but they are inextricably linked to groups, class in this case, which construct interests and identity. Membership in such associations is one way in which people assert their group-constructed identity, owning it as their own. This implies critical reflection upon the purposes constructed by group membership, which is essential to the concept of autonomous agency I defended in chapter one.72 In the world of practical politics, to which Hirst purports to speak, failing to take into account this relational process between identity and interest, nonvoluntary and voluntary group membership must be fatal. Hirst’s model fails because it underestimates attachment to certain types of groups: those linked to identity construction. Political models that assume pure voluntarism rest upon a utopian and unrealizable view of individuality, according to which every human characteristic and expression is freely and rationally chosen and consequently, may be freely abandoned. Conclusion We can trace in the development of Anglo-American political theory of the early to late twentieth century a continuing struggle to contain identity to nationality, and thus to provide a stable context in which a plurality of interests drives politics without threatening social disintegration. In the work of Laski and Cole, the attempt at containment (and Laski’s earlier, even more radical characterization of national identity as one interest. among many) failed as both theorists came to see class membership as fundamentally constitutive of identity and the essential source of interest (I discuss the relationship between class and culture in this period in chapter four). Laski and Cole replaced interest pluralism not with a pluralism of identity, but with a state-centered perspective based upon working-class interests. When interest pluralism is revived by Dahl, a unitary national identity underpins the competition of plural interests that constitutes polyarchy. Finally, Hirst’s approach resembles that of the early Laski: he


relegates the state to the status of a secondary association, and argues moreover that only interest groups make legitimate political claims. It is the definition of identity in terms of nationality that reveals the link between these versions of interest pluralism, and the multiculturalist pluralism I examine in chapter four. There is a paradoxical element to the claims of liberal multiculturalism: the assumption of a single national identity underlying and holding together plural interests has shaped the critical responses of many liberals to multiculturalism, and to its claims for the political status of plural national and ethnic identities. Dahl’s fears about the threat posed to polyarchy by subcultures have been shared by other liberals, who claim that, if “carried too far,” multiculturalism threatens to undermine citizens’ understanding of themselves as engaged in a common project, and consequently, their commitment to social cooperation.73 Recently, however, some liberals have defended minority cultural claims on these very grounds of the primacy of national culture, and it is to these that we turn next.


Chapter Four Multicultural Liberalism

Where modern liberal theorists have addressed pluralities of identity, rather than interest within a national society, they have focused upon multiculturalism, defined usually as the co-existence of several ethnic or national groups within a nation-state. Recent debate has focused on the conflicts between individual and communal rights in culturally plural societies, arising as a result of the assertion of ethnic minority cultural rights.1 As cases involving female genital mutilation and other contested cultural practices demonstrate, this controversy has public policy, as well as philosophical implications. Much of the defense of minority cultural rights from a liberal perspective derives from the work of Will Kymlicka, who rejects the atomistic and interest-based model of the subject, reasserting the role of national community in the construction of individual identity. On this basis, he argues that the state should recognize cultural survival as a collective good, necessary for individual autonomy—a recognition that translates into the legal protection of indigenous minorities and limited self-government for them under a system of multicultural citizenship.2 Kymlicka cites Mill and other nineteenth-century liberals in support of his argument that liberal principles of freedom and autonomy are compatible with the recognition of national membership.3 As I show here, however, these liberal arguments supporting special group rights for national minorities are premised upon an unsustainable distinction between nationality and other forms of social group membership. This is a similar distinction to the one I traced in the work of postMillian liberals, and here, it in fact reinforces the opposition between individual and community. Ironically, it is the artificiality and theoretical unsustainability of such an opposition, to which communitarians have pointed, which impelled “cultural liberals” such as Kymlicka to reject abstract individualism and atomism in the first place. Yael Tamir’s liberal defense of minority nationalism, and Charles Taylor’s arguments for recognition are, as I show here, similarly dependent upon a connection between


nationality and cultural membership that is itself historically contingent; grounded in modern liberalism’s nineteenth-century origins, which were concomitant with the rise of European nationalism. I conclude that cultural liberalism fails to answer the challenges posed by identity politics, and that state protections for national minorities prevent, rather than facilitate, the exercise of autonomy by diverse members of the national group. A liberal theory committed to weak autonomy must oppose the exclusive legal recognition of national minority community rights, particularly differential rights aimed at the preservation over time of minority communities. Kymlicka’s Liberal Defense of Cultural Group Rights One of the most influential discussions of multiculturalism has been Kymlicka’s argument to justify state enforcement of special rights and protections for minority cultural groups on the basis of liberal neutrality. Kymlicka contends that liberal support for individual rights necessarily entails the assumption that persons are situated within a shared social context.4 It is this social and cultural community that provides the roles and narratives enabling individuals to develop or construct themselves and make sense of their place in the world, as well as their view of the good life, and their shared moral and political principles. In order for the state to maintain neutrality and to treat all citizens equally, state policy must ensure that all citizens have access to a range of available options from which to choose their “plan of life.” Moreover, the critical evaluation and selection of life plans is essential to autonomous agency, and self-respect, to which all are entitled, depends upon feeling that one’s life plan is worth carrying out.5 Kymlicka contends that the range of options essential to the free choice and legitimization of ends is provided and determined by cultural membership. As communitarians recognized, different ways of life acquire meaning through patterns of cultural signification, expressed through those narratives held valid by a cultural group. Unlike communitarians, however, Kymlicka maintains that the individual is not determined in any given way by social affiliation, and thus restricted to a given set of values of roles, but rather is able to deliberate and choose between socially constructed ends. Individuals are autonomous agents, not in the strong sense in that they can choose goals and purposes unrelated to their social context and environment, but in the weak sense in that they can deliberate and choose between socially-constructed ends. In fact, according to Kymlicka, people are able to make choices about life projects and moral beliefs only because they are members of a social structure incorporating complex and often contradictory social roles and values.6 Kymlicka reminds us that members of liberal cultures do indeed value their membership in national cultures, and that historically, liberalization

multicultural liberalism / 79

has been accompanied by an increasing consciousness of nationality. Situating himself in the liberal tradition of Mill, Kymlicka suggests that national identities serve as the “primary foci of identification” for persons because they are based upon belonging rather than accomplishment.7 Defenders of liberal or civic nationalism have argued, as Kymlicka points out, that liberal nations reject supporting any particular societal culture over another, maintaining neutrality and allowing all citizens equal opportunities to participate in civil life while remaining active within their societal culture.8 However, as Kymlicka argues, this has not been the case: the United States, for example, has institutionalized the English language, which migrants (below the age of 50) are required to learn in order to gain citizenship. Government business is in English, as is public education. Even bilingual education programs (increasingly less commonly implemented) provide that their ultimate aim is proficiency in English. Kymlicka concludes that the United States has deliberately promoted the integration of all national groups into a single societal culture based on the English language.9 Members of minority cultural groups in multinational liberal democratic states are thus unable to exercise their full freedom of choice and autonomy, because their linguistic and cultural context has not been assigned equal promotion and protection. Integration into the dominant culture is not a satisfactory option for members of threatened communities; because of differences in language and culture, they will be unable to express themselves fully through the options offered by the mainstream. They are entitled to the preservation of their culture because of the central role played by cultural membership in constructing personal identity. Having been socialized to depend upon a particular set of linguistic and cultural conditions, members of minority cultures will be unable to express themselves freely and fully if those conditions are not protected. It is thus no contradiction to liberalism, but rather necessary to it, Kymlicka concludes, that such multinational states grant to minority groups those rights which are necessary to preserve the distinctive culture of the minority. My discussion thus far has referred to national minority groups, and in fact while group rights are linked to personal identity in the national case, Kymlicka makes important distinctions between different kinds of associative groups. Nonnational groupings do not, he argues, fulfil the same cultural role, and are thus not entitled to special protections. In fact, multiculturalism is in his terms restricted to national and ethnic differences. A culture is synonymous with a nation or people: an “inter-generational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language or history.”10 A multicultural state is the result either of immigration from different nations, or of the incorporation of existing nations into the new political community.


These national groupings are defined as societal cultures from which subcultures must be distinguished.11 While the latter might be said to constitute a distinct culture in the localized sense of “distinct customs, perspective or . . . ethos,”12 only societal cultures provide their members with “meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres.”13 In order to justify special rights and protections, Kymlicka argues, groups must provide a separate and encompassing communal life and cultural context for their members, a shared heritage encompassing language and history.14 The encompassing nature of these groups is crucial because it allows for choice—necessary for the free and autonomous development of individuality central to liberalism.15 Autonomy requires critical reflection among options, and this, Kymlicka concludes, can only take place with the availability of alternative roles, models, and narratives within a single culture. Disadvantaged and marginalized social groups or subcultures may make important claims to justice, but are excluded from the same types of rights as nationalities. Kymlicka characterizes these groups as associations of people struggling for equal rights for members, rather than recognition of their separate identities by the state.16 While he remains noncommital on whether such groups generate constitutive ties, it seems clear that they do not, in his view, constitute the same sources of identity as national groups, because they do not offer such an all-encompassing, cultural and linguistic context from which to make life choices. Instead they reflect particular issues, and seek justice for the individuals whose interests or beliefs they represent. One position from which we might criticize these distinctions between groups is that of equal respect for the associative and self-definitional choices of individuals. This is the approach taken by Thomas Pogge, in his argument for treating national minorities no differently from other associative groups.17 Pogge points out that the definitional requirements of ethnic groups: commonality of descent, commonality of continuous culture, and closure are in practice very vague, and could include religious, linguistic, or “lifestyle” groups as well as ethnic minorities. Pogge argues that all legal group-specific rights must be justified on the grounds that they express the free associative choices of individuals, that is they are an expression of autonomy, rather than a precondition for it.18 Because membership in voluntary associations is chosen and entered into by preexisting persons, there is no reciprocal, mutually constituting relationship between group and member. In a version of this argument that tries to combine Pogge and Kymlicka, Yael Tamir argues that national cultures are both the preconditions for, and the expressions of individual autonomy.19


This approach presents of course the problem of assuming that national groups can freely be joined and exited. In fact, critics like Pogge underplay the fixed and ascribed nature of membership in identity groups. It’s important at this point to distinguish between voluntary associations and identity groups, exit from which is impossible or very difficult, into which one is born or assigned by social attitudes and institutions. (The latter group are Hirst’s communities of fate, while the former are communities of choice.) One reason for confusion between these may be that critics confuse ascribed membership in a social group with voluntary affiliation to its organized political bodies. While the NAACP or ACT UP, for example, may be joined and exited, the social categories African Americans and gays cannot be, although individual members may be able to conceal their affiliation in some circumstances. Even groups based upon religion, which may technically be joined and left, in practice exert so much influence over members from birth that the freedom to leave is practically speaking not very real.20 Further, it is not always impossible to leave communities of fate; people can sometimes move between classes, occasionally “pass” as members of another race or ethnic group, conceal a religious identity, and even change sex. But exit in all these cases depends upon either convincing or duping outsiders, rather than simply deciding no longer to belong, as in the case of voluntary associations. Pogge attempts to elide the difference between these categories of group by suggesting that it is the communities of choice—activist groups— formed out of ascribed identity groups that should be entitled to groupspecific rights on the basis of freedom of association.21 But, as we have seen, associational freedom cannot meaningfully apply to identities that are ascribed and exclusive. A more powerful critique of the distinctions between national and nonnational groups can be made by adopting Kymlicka’s own criteria for the special status of national groupings. As we have seen, Kymlicka argues that only national groups constitute “societal cultures,” which offer the range of choices necessary to autonomous individuality. Only a complex societal culture, which is also the inherited culture of its members, can fully shape or construct individual identity. The force of this argument rests in large part on the denial that subnational groups form cultures that shape autonomous individual identity. The voluntarist model Kymlicka and even his critics deploy redescribes deep sources of identity, such as sexual preference as matters of “lifestyle choice.” Kymlicka writes in the tradition of post-Romantic and post-Millian liberal philosophers, for whom, as I have argued in chapter two, culture became entirely associated with nationality, rather than class or other group membership. However the historical association of nationality with culture is concomitant with the idea that groups and classes within the nation also


share particular cultures. When Herder argued originally that cultures are plural, he observed that different nations and periods have specific cultures, as do social and economic groups within the nation.22 Culture was increasingly associated particularly with class during the nineteenth century in Britain, although this was not acknowledged by the political philosophers of the period. A separate culture associated with the “labouring poor” began to emerge in the late eighteenth century.23 Gareth Stedman Jones argues that a new urban working-class culture emerges in London from the 1870s, although it was only by the turn of the twentieth century that middle-class observers recognized that the working class had a separate culture of its own, rather than no culture at all. Jones comments that working-class culture is such a pervasive theme in Britain even today that class is perceived to be a cultural rather than economic or political category.24 In contemporary political discourse, the significant culture-producing categories also include race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion, and the association between personal identity and membership in subnational groups formed along these axes informs the claims of identity politics, as I discussed in chapter one. As we saw, these groups are clearly (as Herder argued originally) cultural communities that shape identity. The key differences between them, and the ethnic-national groups, for which Kymlicka argues special rights, are first, that social groups do not constitute communities or cultures in an overarching or all-inclusive sense, and second, they are not necessarily linked by a fundamentally exclusive mode of communication such as shared language (although deaf communities are a clear exception here). Of course, language cannot function as an exclusive marker in the case of national identities either, given the loss of national language among indigenous minorities.25 Moreover, as Brian Walker points out, shared language cannot be taken to denote shared cultural membership; French speakers in Quebec, for example, are separated into distinct groups by location, class, custom, and lifestyle.26 The intersection of language with other cultural differences (as I shall later argue in the case of the Quebecois) demonstrates that the range of socially marked groups is potentially limitless, each individual inevitably belongs to several socially marked groups, and no single one can wholly shape identity. Moreover, as I pointed out in chapter one, some people, such as those of mixed race heritage, or bisexuals, may be assigned to separate and mutually exclusive groups. This is important to bear in mind when considering the often made criticism that identity politics theory assumes a determining relationship between group membership and individual identity.27 Some aspects of identity, of course, seem to owe less to social construction than to genetics and family environment and relations. But even apart from these, identity is contingent: individuals will choose to identify with one


group or another on the basis of particular circumstances. I have discussed earlier the importance of groups reclaiming their ascribed identities, and this social process is mirrored in the individual act of identification. While ascription as a group member happens independently of one’s will, identification with that group need not be automatic. A gay black man may choose to identify himself as black on some occasions, gay on others, and gay black on yet others. Similarly, American citizens may identify themselves as Americans on occasions when the nation is engaged in external struggle, for example, in times of war or the current campaign against international terrorism, while understanding themselves in terms of class, race, gender, or religion, say, in the context of domestic political struggles. (The reach of mass and diverse media into people’s lives now means that those contexts may operate simultaneously.) A good example of the complexity attendant here is that of the 1992 Senate confirmation hearings upon the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment against him by Anita Hill. Having minimized his own identification as black prior to the allegations, Thomas accused the Senate of attempting to lynch him during the hearings, thus powerfully identifying himself in race terms. Hill was attacked by many sections of the African American community as a “race traitor,” for placing her alleged feminist identity above that of her race (Hill had never been an active feminist). For many white feminists, the case demonstrated that gendered identity was more fundamental than race. Some black feminists argued for the carving out of a separate identity category: black women, in which neither terms was simply a qualifier of the other. For both the leading actors and observers in this drama, identity was complex, shifting, and dependent upon immediate political context.28 What both the defenders and critics of identity politics have failed to point out is that the complexity of identity produced by multiple group membership plays the same role in ensuring autonomy that ethnic identity does for Kymlicka. The availability of a range of options, roles, and narratives is key to his argument for special protections for national minorities, because it preserved the context of choice essential to weak autonomy. Such a range is in fact provided by the fact of multiple group membership. Autonomous agency involves as a first step the coming to self-knowledge of the complex social, as well as personal aspects of identity—a process similar to that described by the communitarian view of agency, except for the fact that I stress here the plurality of subjectivity. Influenced in the directions of a range of ends, individuals then weigh these against each other in their specific context, in a process of second-order reflection, sometimes deciding in one direction, sometimes another. Each perceives aspects of herself from the vantage point of other aspects, and thus the process of self-understanding


leads to reflection and decision. The subject is able, as Michael Walzer puts it “to reflect critically on the values which have governed its socialization,”29 although it cannot step outside all aspects of its identity at once, into an unsituated subject position.30 It follows that those who are more conscious of their fragmented identities, because they belong to minority identity groups, will be more conscious of this process of reflection. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” and feminist standpoint theory describe the wider and more complex perspectives on social reality on the part of people of color and women—but also, we might add, theorize their capacity to take a more critical perspective upon their own desires and moral choices.31 If membership in a range of identity-constructing groups ensures autonomy, it cannot be argued that equal treatment requires the special protection specifically of minority nationalities. I have argued my case so far accepting at face value Kymlicka’s claims for the operation of national groups. But it should in fact be noted that many national-ethnic groups do not offer a range of role models and scripts, but rather attempt to fix identity by restricting and enforcing roles. Kymlicka implicitly acknowledges this when he discusses individual dissent from community norms. I return to this aspect of his theory later. In cases where national or ethnic groups admit different roles, models, and scripts, it may be argued that the community has been lost or destroyed. To illustrate this, we might refer to Kymlicka’s use of the example of Quebec, a case that also demonstrates the inadequacy of common language as a determining cultural marker.32 Kymlicka argues that Quebecois culture was traditionally rural, Catholic, conservative and patriarchal. During the 1960s, however, there was an intensive period of liberalization—the “Quiet Revolution”—during which Quebecois society transformed itself, so that it now exhibits “all the diversity that any modern society contains, eg. atheists and Catholics, gays and heterosexuals, urban yuppies and rural farmers, socialists and conservatives, etc.”33 Kymlicka cites this as evidence supporting his claim that people feel strong attachments to national cultures even when they are liberalized, and produce only a thin sense of identity. In this case, members of the Quebecois cultural community share little in common anymore except for the French language. We might also conclude, however, that the very diversity of Quebecois society now indicates that its members have come to understand themselves in very different and more complex ways, as belonging to or affiliated with a new range of different cultural groups, on the basis of factors other than language. Whereas in traditional Quebec, according to Kymlicka, linguistic, national, religious, and class identity lined up uniformly to produce a relatively homogeneous complex identity in members, the different axes of identity have come to diverge (as a result of Quebec’s late modernization) to produce a pluralist society of


crosscutting cleavages, whose members all share only a linguistic heritage and commitment. Thus the Quebecois separatist movement’s exclusivist language policies were not enough to elicit support for secession. In summary: a homogeneous cultural community (at least, in Kymlicka’s own characterization) has become a linguistic group, competing for support with the other identity groups flourishing in the newly liberalized Quebec. Quebecois culture (as Kymlicka imagines national culture) has disappeared, to be replaced by a complex social framework in which Quebecois linguistic culture forms only one source of individual identification. The problem here is that if cultural communities must provide a range of choices to ensure autonomy for their members, they must be plurally constituted, in which case provision must be made for individuals to participate in decision making as members of a range of affected groups. If cultural communities must provide a stable and fixed cultural context, they will not provide the conditions for autonomy unless the other group affiliations of their members are recognized also. If this does not occur, attempts to protect the homogeneity of national identity will only conceal its contested and political character. Amelie Rorty has pointed to this danger in assuming communal homogeneity, which she terms cultural essentialism.34 Rorty observes that anthropologists reject the assumption that cultures are characterized by a set of fixed ideas, styles, or meanings. There can be no real separation between culture on the one hand, and political and economic practices and affiliations on the other, as these are culturally defined and express and articulate cultural practices. Kymlicka (and Charles Taylor, at whom her critique is principally directed) grant cultural identity special status by virtue of its internal cohesion and historical continuity, but Rorty counters that identity is often contested within cultural groups, as groups compete for the right of authoritative description.35 The very social practices that seem to mark cultural identity may in fact reveal its contestedness, as historians have shown in investigating the ways in which national traditions are constructed to maintain social cohesion and to legitimize structures and relations of power within groups.36 Because models like Kymlicka’s fail to acknowledge the struggles for identity within the national group, they inevitably explain internal opposition to prevailing definitions of national identity as the expression of individual dissent. Opposition to the roles and values prescribed by the group can thus be accounted for only in terms of individual rights claims. The ironic result of this is only to return to the dichotomy between individual rights and cultural membership against which Kymlicka developed his arguments for national minority rights in the first place. The debate then turns on the extent to which national groups are bound to respect individual rights. Should national minorities be permitted to be illiberal: to discriminate


internally against members in such a way as to deny them their individual rights?37 Kymlicka’s response is that, given the priority to liberalism and his own theory of group rights of individual autonomy, liberals are bound to insist on the extension of full civil rights to all members of national minority groups. (They may not, however, actually force such groups to respect liberal rights. Kymlicka cites approvingly the Supreme Court’s decision in Martinez v. Santa Clara Pueblo requiring individual Native Americans to apply to tribal courts, not to the mainstream legal process, to interpret the Indian Civil Rights Act.38) The inadequacy of the model in which women’s individual rights are pitted against cultural norms becomes clear in cases involving the boundaries of indigenous community membership. (Not coincidentally, these are cases that foreground the most controversial aspect of Kymlicka’s argument: cultural survival.) In Canada, for example, where kinship rather than blood determines membership, Kymlicka argues that indigenous communities should be allowed to prevent Indian women from living on reservations if they marry non-Indian men, although Indian men who marry non-Indian spouses are permitted to remain members, in the name of protecting the authenticity of the community.39 “Family integrity” trumps sexual equality, and the individual rights of affected women to be treated the same as men cannot trump the right of the community to recreate itself in this case. But by accounting for Canadian Indian women’s opposition to the rule in terms of individual rights, Kymlicka fails to acknowledge the claims these women are making to recognition of their lived experience as both Indians and women, and members of the social group Indian women. The identities of Canadian Indian women are complexly articulated in postcolonial societies (such as Canada and the United States) because the cultural unity of the national group (assuming it ever existed) has already been irretrievably destroyed by colonial settlement.40 Similar failures to recognize women as group members drive the debate over the impact of multiculturalism and women’s rights in Susan Okin’s essay “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” Okin and most of her respondents frame the relation between multiculturalism and feminism as a clash between the group rights of cultures, and the individual human rights of women as individuals.41 As Okin herself points out, assuming the homogeneity of ethnic groups, only privileges the self-definition of the dominant patriarchal group in the community against dissenters. But the conflict here is most accurately viewed not as one between the lone individual woman and the patriarchal forces dominating her national group, but between women and men within an ethnic group. The casting of dissident women as Westernized individualists seeking to destroy a united culture (like the charges made against Anita Hill) is an attempt to recreate a fantasy of unity


that, as I have argued, works to the advantage of those within the national community empowered to determine the authenticity of cultural practices. Once we acknowledge the possibility of diversity within national communities, Kymlicka’s justification for special rights for national minorities understood in terms of cultural substance must fail. If national or communal identity is synonymous with that of the dominant class or social group, the preservation of national cultural identity alone cannot allow all individuals to develop freely, as Kymlicka contends. In fact, if national or cultural identity reflects the assumptions, aspirations, and beliefs of only the dominant social group, its privileging runs the risk of only further reinforcing the power relations within a community that subordinate individuals as subgroup members. Tamir’s Liberal Nationalism Arguing from a more explicitly voluntarist position, Tamir both recognizes the special role of national membership in constructing identity, and, like Kukathas,42 characterizes nations as voluntary societies for individual cultural expression. Tamir takes individual membership in national groups as a liberal right on the grounds that cultural or communal membership is a good essential to personal autonomy and reflectivity, and that such communities provide the necessary context in which moral choices can be made.43 Like Kymlicka, Tamir argues that personal autonomy and communal belonging are not antithetical, but rather, complementary concepts. The autonomous person can “reflect on, evaluate and choose his conception of the good, his ends and his cultural and national affiliations, but is capable of such choices because he is situated in a particular social and cultural environment that offers him evaluative criteria.”44 Unlike Kymlicka, Tamir insists that national affiliation can be voluntarily chosen—accepted or rejected—even though individual identity is shaped by membership in a particular community.45 Like Kukathas, she sees national associations as voluntary societies, the right of membership in which must be protected by the state along with other liberal rights and freedoms. Tamir examines the ethical implications of her voluntarist concept of national membership in her comments on the rights of women in illiberal cultures. She argues that cultural rights tend to produce conservative interpretations of cultural practices, which assume the point of view of powerful male interests within a cultural group. Culture should be viewed, she concludes, not as fixed and frozen, but as subject to constant recreation in an agonistic process of internal contestation. Emphasizing the individual rights of women members of illiberal cultures also enables them to bring about cultural change.46


Tamir’s insistence upon the voluntary nature of cultural communities raises the same concerns about entrance and exit with which Kymlicka responded to Kukathas. Communities constructed around an objective and socially marked distinction cannot freely be entered or exited; moreover, some groups deprive members of the opportunity to learn about the outside world and alternatives to their way of life.47 As Bernard Yack has pointed out, Tamir fails to appreciate the involuntary nature of much communal membership because she employs an ahistorical and asocial conception of culture, seeing it as the sharing of a preference for particular forms of expression.48 Thus she underplays the importance of shared experience— shared because people are perceived as members of the same group. Although Tamir understands national communities to be voluntary, she also sees them as playing a different and more essential role with respect to individual autonomy than other groupings. It is the nation that allows individuals to develop a culture and aims, and that provides a set of norms and values in the light of which people make choices and become free and autonomous individuals.49 But in making her argument for the relationship between community and individuality, Tamir concedes that the nation is not a unique group in this respect. She remarks that membership in the nation produces the same “feeling of belonging and moral obligations” as membership in other constitutive communities organized according to class or gender.50 The key difference seems to be the historical continuity of the group: Membership in a nation, unlike membership in a gender, class or region, thus enables an individual to find a place not only in the world in which he or she lives, but also in an uninterrupted chain of being. Nationhood promotes fraternity both among fellow members and across generations. It endows human action with a meaning that endures over time, thus carrying a promise of immortality.51

Whether or not this Romantic conception of national identity may satisfactorily be applied to the nation-state, it is clearly inadequate in distinguishing national group identity in pluralist societies. Many of the subnational groups I examined in chapter one are also concerned with recovering their “lost histories,” in which present members can locate their own stories. Much of the work of feminist historians and literary critics has focused on telling women’s histories, and reconstructing a canon of woman writers designed to provide for women a sense of historical place and continuity, as well as role models across generations. Similar projects are advanced by gay and lesbian, and African American scholars. Conversely, minority national identity itself does not always enjoy the historical continuity described by Tamir.52


As Kymlicka points out, the distinction between national and nonnational groups is essential to Tamir’s argument. Without it, there seems to be no reason why freedom of speech and expression would not be sufficient to allow people to express their national identity.53 Tamir considers the possibility that nonnational minority groups may be entitled to autonomy on the grounds that they function like national minorities only in passing. In this context, she treats such groups not as constitutive communities, but as associations of interest and like-mindedness, groups which are distinguished from national communities on the grounds that they “have no desire to isolate themselves, but instead wish to persuade the majority to adopt their views.”54 The reference to views is revealing here: Tamir understands subnational groups to express moral belief rather than cultural identity,55 and of course for liberals, moral belief cannot be compelled, but must be chosen. But as I argued in chapter one, moral beliefs arise out of cultural identity, which must be expressed and recognized for those moral beliefs to be accepted as legitimate. In discussing the right to national self-determination, Tamir claims that the desire for self-determination is not the same as that for political or civil liberties, but is rather a search for recognition, for status.56 The right to national self-determination is predicated upon the relationship between membership in the nation and personal identity—a relationship extending to other identity groups. As Tamir writes: “The selfimage of individuals is highly affected by the status of their national community. The ability of individuals to lead a satisfying life and to attain the respect of others is contingent on, although not assured by, their ability to view themselves as active members of a worthy community.”57 Here she echoes Rawls’s claim, which I discussed in chapter one, that the crucial good of self-respect is dependent upon the recognition of groups to which individuals belong and with which they identify. Part of the role played by communities in influencing personal identity is to generate the ties that produce moral obligations. Tamir points out that liberal theories of justice, including Rawls’s, assume stronger duties of care toward members of one’s own community.58 Constitutive ties generate special obligations.59 But in her examples, Tamir fails to support or even maintain her own distinction between national and subnational groups, citing membership in families, sex, and class groups as well as nations. In fact, ties to subnational groups may, she allows, conflict with and trump national ties in some circumstances.60 Like Kymlicka, Tamir characterizes internal opposition to prevailing definitions of national identity in terms of individual dissent. On the question of Canadian women’s rights to bring non-Indian spouses to live on reservations, Tamir counters that rights to culture should be granted to individuals, not communities, in which case Indian women could demand


that their communities respect their rights to marry non-Indians while remaining members of the community. This would admittedly change the community but, she argues, “the right to culture is not only meant to grant to individuals the right to follow their culture as given, but also to recreate it.” But despite her criticism of Kymlicka, Tamir also mischaracterizes the source and meaning of opposition to traditional cultural custom in cases such as this—failing to account, as does he, for the complex group membership that shapes the experience of Indian women.61 Taylor and the Politics of Recognition Charles Taylor also argues that the liberal presumptions of equal worth and equal rights require the recognition of culturally and communally constructed identities.62 But whereas both Kymlicka and Tamir discuss identity formation from the point of view of subjective identification and experience, Taylor focuses on identity formation as a dialogical and intersubjective process taking place within an overall social context. Cultural groups must be recognized by other groups and by society as a whole because failing to accord recognition has a deleterious effect upon the self-conception of group members.63 Taylor points out that social relations fundamentally shape identity, and that group demands for recognition are premised on the dialogical or intersubjective construction of identity which renders it dependent upon the attitudes of others. Human life is fundamentally dialogical, in that we become full human agents, capable of defining our identities through our interactions with others.64 Recognition (and failures of recognition) by others thus shapes our understanding of ourselves: Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or a group or people can suffer real damage . . . if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted and reduced mode of being.65

The modern notion of individuality requires the recognition of each person’s unique identity. For procedural liberalism, this has meant treating all citizens in a difference-blind manner. According to the politics of difference, however, the recognition of individual identity must incorporate recognition of the specificity of groups to which individuals belong and which influence their sense of self. Moreover, the survival of these groups is crucial to the self-respect and dignity of members.66 Taylor concludes that the demand for recognition of individual authenticity, necessary to universal


equality, paradoxically requires the recognition of group specificity and the rights of cultures to survival.67 Here he departs from both Kymlicka and Tamir, neither of whom are able to justify the rights of cultures to survive into future generations on the basis of their individualist defenses of culture.68 Like Kymlicka and Tamir, Taylor falls into the twin traps of cultural exclusivity and cultural essentialism, which I have described earlier. He establishes no stable distinction between national cultures and other communities. In fact, he often refers to subnational groups of people such as women to support his arguments for the importance of recognition, although his conclusions refer only to ethnic or national groups.69 At the same time, he assumes a unity and homogeneity within cultural communities that conceals internal struggles between subnational groups for power to define the community or nation. Conclusion Multicultural liberalism represents a real attempt to take seriously the situated self of communitarianism, and to reinscribe culture into the discourses of individuality and rights. This is in part because liberals are responding to communitarian and civic republican charges that liberal theory has undervalued citizenship.70 It is less satisfactory as a response to the concerns of identity groups, because its understanding of community and culture is predicated, like that of the nineteenth-century collectivist liberals, upon a national model. Multicultural liberalism ultimately fails to maintain the special status for national cultures on which its prescriptions for special rights to autonomy are based. The claim to special status fails on both empirical and theoretical grounds. In chapter one, I discussed the way in which members of identity groups formed along a range of axes understand their membership to shape and influence who they are, by providing roles, narratives, and meanings that help to explicate and make sense of their experience. Moreover, multicultural liberals cannot legitimize special rights for national groups on the grounds that such groups constitute an overall (“societal”) context, and thus provide a broad range of roles and narratives from which members may draw to create themselves. Rather, they must be understood to comprise a stable, fixed context, thus offering a limited and particular set of cultural influences. Otherwise, they would deserve no special protections against external change. But once we acknowledge the particularity and specificity of national cultures, the distinction between them and other identity-constituting groups drops away. The new liberal multiculturalists are committed, as Kymlicka puts it, to fully acknowledging the connections between the state and its particular


culture.71 Kymlicka, Tamir, and Taylor all assume that national culture plays a special role in shaping identity—that in fact, national culture is the culture in which identity is embedded. This recognition of the relationship between the nation and the situated subject is a step in the right direction for reconciling liberalism with identity politics. It rejects the model of the subject as a rational individual who possesses and pursues interests—a model that, as I argued in chapters two and three, came to dominate pluralism as a result of the separation of identity and interests. Kymlicka explicitly locates himself as the liberal heir to Mill and Green, and in his focus on the importance of belonging he reflects the Romantic criticism that bourgeois social and economic relations have failed to recognize and express full human personality, with its attendant passions and desire for immortality.72 As we have seen, Tamir also draws upon Romantic liberalism in her defense of the special character of national communities based on historical continuity. Arguments such as these, however, reveal the problematic connection between Romantic individuality and state power. As Kymlicka acknowledges, he is committed to making plain the connections between the state and its particular culture.73 In assuming the post-Millian liberal centrality of national membership, he characterizes other groups as associations of shared interests or moral views—the expression of individual identity, rather than the grounds of its constitution. But many of the identity groups I referred to above are also concerned to recover their “lost histories,” in which present members can locate their own stories. Much of the work of feminist historians and literary critics has focused on telling women’s histories, and reconstructing a canon of women writers designed to provide for women a sense of historical place and continuity, as well as role models across generations.74 Similar projects are advanced by gay and lesbian, and African American scholars. Religious groups narrate and memorialize their own histories, often through religious ritual. To many groups, the idea of place in an uninterrupted chain of being, however historically inaccurate it may be, functions through cultural imagination as a powerfully cohesive force. These assumptions of the unity and the fundamental character of national culture leave multicultural liberals open to the charge of cultural essentialism, and consequently, lead to two related problems. First, they cannot account for intragroup conflict in any terms other than that of individual struggles against the collectivity. As I have noted, this merely reinscribes the conflict between individual and group against which their theories were developed in the first place. Second, they cannot account for power struggles between identity-based groups within the national community, over definitions of what is culturally acceptable or appropriate. Inevitably, they accept the self-definition of the hegemonic group within the nation.


Underlying the unsatisfactory distinction between national and nonnational cultural communities is a confusion over the relationship between voluntary and ascribed communities. Liberals like Tamir and Hirst, as we saw in chapter three resist the idea that ascription produces real communities that significantly shape and influence their members. After all, enforced membership threatens to contradict the basic liberal principles of freedom and autonomy. Nevertheless, the practical implications of membership, and the education and socialization that it entails may mean that any right to exit is nominal at best. Tamir’s and Pogge’s insistence that membership in a national community is voluntary is clearly impractical, but so is exit from many other groups constructed around differences that are objectively defined and marked as socially significant. Because identity group membership is the result of ascription, and identity is the result of a dialogical process, a unilateral decision to leave a group may not be recognized by others, and hence may not be effective. On the other hand, individual members may clearly choose to reject certain aspects of their group-defined identity—choose not to identify with a particular community. They are not exiting the group, but they are rejecting its influencing characteristics. Recognition of such a right is essential to liberal autonomous agency, and is what differentiates a liberal from a non-liberal version of identity politics. The terminology used (in the service of different arguments) by Tamir and Hirst, of voluntary entrance to and exit from groups is not helpful in understanding the processes at work here. This special focus upon national minority culture is in part a result of the political contexts, general and specific, from which these theories have emerged. In the global political context, the resurgence of theoretical interest in nationalism owes to recent international developments: the post–Cold War proliferation of nationalist movements in Eastern Europe, the conflict in Yugoslavia, and the sense that divisive and potentially violent nationalist sentiment is the big problem for “end-of-history” liberals to solve. As far as specific context is concerned, Taylor and Kymlicka write in Canada in the shadow of the Quebec separatist movement, and Tamir is concerned with the status of Palestinians in Israel. All three are interested less in the relations between identity groups in a pluralist society than with theorizing political demands for rights to self-determination—a right that has not of course historically been granted to nonnational groups.75 The autonomy of minority national groups is thus justified on the same grounds that earlier liberals justified national liberation movements. In both theories, the nation is assumed to be a unified and encompassing group, subordinating all other forms of social expression. The national minority that these theorists argue is entitled to self-government and autonomy is virtually indistinguishable from a separate state, except in that it shares


territory with the dominant society. The problem of diversity has been solved by entirely separating the new national community from the original one. This is of course not to say that national membership is not an important constituent of individual identity, nor that it will not be, in some cases, the most important form of identification. But efforts to grant a privileged legal status to national minorities, usually indigenous communities, have led to two different sorts of political problems. First, where indigenous communities have been granted constitutional protection and limited selfgovernment, disagreement has erupted over definitions of membership, inclusion, and exclusion. In the new world countries, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, where indigenous communities have been granted limited rights, debate and conflict has centered around whether blood line, cultural kinship, or history of local community ties should function as the legitimate marker of membership.76 Minority groups within minorities in these cases claim that the granting of self-government or land rights has legitimized the claim of the dominant group in the minority to speak authoritatively for the whole. Second, members of nonnational minority groups asserting cultural status claim that they too, in order to be treated equally by the state, are entitled to some form of recognition, including the right to participate as a group in the policy-making process. One response to this of course would be to refuse formal recognition or inclusion in policy making to all groups. The problematic question of membership and authoritative voice in legally and constitutionally recognized minority communities arises as a result of the general and cross-issue status of legal protections for national minorities, such as those advocated by Kymlicka. These difficulties are likely to arise in any proposed recognition model that formally grants groups rights across a range of issues, or guaranteed seats in permanent representative institutions.77 As some critics have argued, proportional representation, rather than the district system, offers a more flexible approach than fixed minority seats, and is suitable for culturally and ideologically pluralist societies. It allows a larger range of groups to be represented in legislatures, recognizes that the constellation of groups may change as issues change, and encourages coalition building between groups.78 In chapter five, I outline a liberal model for group representation in deliberation and decision making.

Chapter Five Group Representation and Deliberative Liberalism

The interest pluralism model explored in chapter three is reflected in what remained until the 1990s the dominant paradigm for understanding democratic politics in Western democracies. As Dahl described the system of polyarchy, the competition between interests drove and contained the political process. Those with shared interests organized with the rational aim of capturing the support of legislators, who in turn competed for the support of organized interest groups. Those with political claims that could not be formulated in terms of competing interests were marginalized from the political process. As a result, identity claims that originally concerned recognition were for the most part expressed and interpreted in terms of the demands of interest. Recently, however, this interest pluralist model has been replaced by a more deliberative model of democratic politics, which emphasizes multilayered processes of debate and exchange over policies amongst those affected by them, with the ultimate goal of the collaborative formation of policy in more formal deliberative arenas. Advocates of deliberative democracy see it as a more accurate description of the political process, as well as a normative ideal, which can be used to construct frameworks for political decisionmaking. In deliberative democratic theory, process is as important as outcomes, and because of this, participants are presumed to be attached to outcomes at a deeper level than is possible under interest pluralism. As Iris Young describes, deliberative theorists, when describing features of the dominant model to which they object, have tended to subsume even interests to preferences, and to focus on the market model of competition between preferences/interests.1 I argue in this chapter, however, that deliberative theory arises not only as a critical counter to the market model of the political process, but also as a response to the frustrations of identity politics. There has been considerable argument about the extent to which deliberative democracy is accommodating


to identity groups’ demands for voice. In the first part of this chapter, I argue that while the deliberative model offers the best approach for ensuring representation and political participation given the liberal pluralism for which I have argued, the model must be revised to allow for the recognition of identity groups, as precedent to the reasoned exchange of ideas and perspectives. Underlying the question of what constitutes deliberative speech, are issues concerning the acknowledgment of the status of deliberating participants. I explore the status of greeting, testimony, and apology as forms of speech in deliberation, and argue that all of these either express the need for, or confer recognition. I conclude that while deliberative politics has aimed to sidestep the politically difficult question of identity, the recognition of parties in their own self-identifying terms must precede deliberation. Having considered participation in the democratic process, I turn in the second part of the chapter to consider strategies for the representation of identity groups in formal deliberative bodies—both legislative and advisory. I discuss and reject the formalized and permanent representation of minority groups, and advocate a decentralized and issue-specific approach to the representation of different identity groups, particularly at the local level. Deliberative Politics and Recognition Deliberative democracy has enjoyed widespread popularity as both a normative and descriptive paradigm for democratic politics in recent years.2 Its advocates describe it as a response to the kind of persistent moral disagreement that frustrates policy making in an ethically pluralist society.3 From this perspective, it is political liberalism of the variety I described in chapter one, applied to the democratic process. But political liberalism does not necessarily require deliberation, and is compatible with a less participatory democratic process. Moreover, ethical pluralism is a perennial problem for liberal societies. In fact, the popularity of deliberation can best be understood not because of the way the theory incorporates moral pluralism, but in terms of its successful response to the challenges posed to the previously dominant interest pluralist model by two significant and related developments in the postwar politics of Western pluralist democracies.4 The first of these was the movement for participatory democracy, which emerged in the 1960s amongst New Left student groups, and which shaped the philosophical foundations of the new social movements organized around gender, race, and sexuality. Participatory democracy challenged the notion that the political process was engineered by political elites responding to organized popular interests, expressed through voting. Like the civic republican tradition from which it derived, participatory democracy focused on the moral value of public action, which accrued to both actors and the community.

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Politics was redefined as public action, and political actors as citizens.5 While participatory democrats emerged from outside of traditional political institutions, even the federal government in the United States responded to popular demands for more participation in politics, as early as 1964 with the formation of Community Action programs. The rhetoric of participatory democracy was revived more recently under the Clinton administration, as is evident from the repopularization of the town hall meeting, a format for public debate picked up by the broadcast media and televized. The second challenge to interest pluralism emerged with the rise of identity politics, articulated by the new social movements as I discussed in chapter one, by which marginalized groups demanded inclusion and recognition in the political process on their own terms. Identity politics transforms the definition of politics from the process by which decisions are reached, to the processes by which political actors assert their claims to recognition and inclusion in decision making. Where the interest pluralist model focused on the possession of interests as the starting point for politics, identity politics, as I have argued, views interests as the secondary products of collective identity. It emphasizes the construction of individual identity through the complex interaction of involuntary group membership and social ascription, and deliberate identification, as I discussed in chapter one. Identity politics produces a “politics of presence,”6 in which political subjects express their own claims in their own terms, much as Mill argued on behalf of the working class when speaking in support of Gladstone’s franchise bill. In short, identity politics assumes a participatory politics, in which the seeking and proffering of public recognition of group identity and value become central to the political process. In chapter one, I set out a liberal model of identity politics, in which ascribed group identity and individual identification interact to produce a model of the social construction of identity that escapes the charge of determinism. As I pointed out, concerns about the involuntary nature of assigned group membership had led many liberals to reject the idea that political claims for recognition arise from the social construction of personal identity. Many liberal critics suggested that identity politics as commonly understood tended to essentialize individual identity in terms of group membership. Moreover, it effectively reduced all political conflicts to questions concerning the assertion and recognition of group identity. Disputes over the allocation of resources or ethical priorities are either subsumed into demands for recognition, or regarded as secondary problems, solutions to which will naturally follow recognition and inclusion. Critics have argued that identity groups aim only to assert themselves in the public sphere, and are unprepared for the subsequent political business of negotiation and compromise necessary to reach any agreement on divisive issues.7


Those responding to the claims of identity groups concerning specific policy disputes face the practical problem of how to bridge the differences between groups: to establish communication that would steer clear of the assimilation of minority positions into the mainstream, and yet provide a way for the concrete experience of others to be accounted, comprehended, and related to common political problems. The problem was a difficult one, and identity politics theorists have been frequently criticized by liberals for proposing a model of politics in which the inescapable specificity of identity makes recognition a zero–sum game, competition between identity groups inevitable, and commitment to cooperative projects impossible to sustain. As a paradigm for democratic politics, interest pluralism was unable to respond either to participatory democrats’ demands that political decisions be legitimized by the degree of popular participation in their making, or to identity politics’ concerns with recognizing participants. Interest pluralism assumed that popular participation in the political process was limited, and that political actors sought to mobilize interests, rather than express identities. Deliberative democracy’s redirection of the focus of politics to the process of debate over policy formation amongst those affected clearly reflects the influence of participatory democracy. In addition, however, much of the appeal of the paradigm lies in its positing of a discursive process that circumvents the difficulties in intergroup communication presented by identity politics, while establishing new theoretical grounds for political legitimation. While there are important differences between deliberative democrats, all adhere to the core principle that democratic legitimacy be dependent upon the ability and opportunity to participate in “effective deliberation” upon collective decisions on the part of those who are subject to them.8 Deliberation—speaking and arguing as a form of participation— between free and equal citizens, thus takes the place of voting and interest aggregation as the source of legitimacy for democratic government. While both the interest pluralist and deliberative paradigms address the problem of politics in a culturally, morally, and philosophically pluralist society, they take fundamentally different approaches to dealing with disagreement: for the interest pluralist, disagreement is solved by competition, for the deliberative democrat, debate aims to reach consensus by proceeding according to previously determined norms. Deliberative democracy places at its center the process of the formulation of and commitment to moral positions, which takes place through public debate. We might usefully account for the aim of deliberative democratic theory as an attempt to reconcile the ontological claims of identity politics with a communitarian-inspired commitment to democratic community. Like feminism and other forms of identity politics, deliberative democracy


recognizes that the formation of beliefs, positions, and preferences is a political process, shaped by private and social attachments. But where identity politics produced assertions of difference and denied commonality as homogenizing, in deliberative democracy, rational exchange directed toward persuasion to consensus becomes the medium through which difference is negotiated. Given the norms of liberty and equality, deliberation constitutes a process by which citizens with different “thick identities” may meet and debate, according to common rational discursive norms, which enable them to bridge their differences.9 Iris Young has dealt most explicitly with the relationship between particular identity and democratic deliberation, by rejecting the expression of identity as the fundamental concern of social groups, and focusing instead on group members’ common experiences of subordination. Understood in these terms, social difference and group inequality become a “resource” for democratic deliberation, in that they ensure that different social experiences and perspectives inform and affect public debate.10 Young’s redefinition of identity groups as structural social groups reflects the focus of both deliberative democrats and their critics on issues of resources and distribution. Discussion of problems with the deliberative democracy model has tended to focus mainly on the practical problems associated with equal inclusion in the deliberative process. Socioeconomic inequalities, inflected often by race, mean that those social groups most likely to be adversely affected by policies lack the resources or access necessary to full participation in debate over them.11 A more fundamental problem for deliberative democracy, however, concerns the relationship between the legitimacy and status of participants, on the one hand, and forms of speech, on the other. In fact, the much rehearsed question of what kind of speech constitutes legitimate discursive participation is most significant because of its implications for the status of participants. A central tenet of deliberative democracy is that not all forms of public debate and discussion constitute the kind of deliberative exchange capable of legitimizing policy decisions. Deliberative theorists have taken different approaches to the question of what kind of norms and material conditions are required for deliberative speech, but most impose some restrictions requiring that speech conform to commonly accepted rational codes: that it be rationally acceptable to other parties or to some hypothetical third party to the debate.12 For Habermas, the necessary structure of deliberation implies those norms of equality and reciprocity that govern the ideal speech situation. The norm of shared pursuit of consensus through intersubjective exchange, assuming liberty and opportunity, functions as the ideal precondition of the deliberative process, which must be present to confer legitimacy upon what is agreed upon in the process.13 Amy Gutmann and Denis Thompson spell


out the process in more detail: in the actual process of deliberation, participants must reason beyond their narrow self-interest and accept that their arguments appeal to reasons and principals that are reciprocally accepted.14 In addition, parties to deliberation must accept that their discussions be public, and that they be held accountable for their positions and decisions.15 As we have seen, because deliberative democracy aims to privilege reason over power, and because many see consensus as the end-goal of deliberation, rational argument is assumed to be the mode in which deliberation will take place, rather than the expression and communication of feeling. Deliberation is thus governed by a set of procedures designed to ensure impartiality and practical rationality. But reason is not outside the dynamics of social power: as Young and other critics have argued, rational deliberation and debate, designed to win others over to a point of view, is a form of speech to which those privileged in terms of class, gender, and race have privileged access.16 It assumes firstly equal access to the public sphere, so that everyone may make, consider, and reject proposals freely. And it privileges as signs of articulateness certain types of speech over others, namely, reasoned argument, with the effect of excluding individuals and groups whose modes of communication rely more upon rhetoric, emotional appeal, and narrative.17 Reasoned argument follows logical rules and proceeds from generalities to particularities. Under these conversational rules, speech that merely expresses feeling is irrelevant unless conclusions may be drawn from it. Moreover, those bodily gestures that may accompany speech, such as weeping or reaching out, threaten the objectivity of reasoned discourse. Young writes: The norms of deliberation . . . privilege speech that is dispassionate and disembodied. They tend to presuppose an opposition between mind and body, reason and emotion. They tend falsely to identify objectivity with calm and absence of emotional expression. Thus expressions of anger, hurt and passionate concern discount the claims and reasons they accompany. Similarly, the entrance of the body into speech—in wide gestures, movements of nervousness or body expressions of emotion—are signs of weakness that cancel out one’s assertions or reveal one’s lack of objectivity and control.18

Young advocates communicative democracy, in which public speech is not limited to the rational argument associated with deliberation.19 But the question of emotional and rhetorical speech has led to some concern among critics, for whom the very appeal of deliberation was that it allowed reason to prevail over the exercise of power, expressed in censorship and exclusion in the public process of opinion formation. Seyla Benhabib’s response to this is to construct a distinction between common deliberation, in a plurality of associations, over policy and legislation, and “the informally


structured process of everyday communication among individuals who share a cultural and historical lifeworld.” She argues that greeting, storytelling, and rhetoric, while all aspects of communication in everyday life, cannot become the public language of institutions and legislatures in a democracy, because democratic institutions must, to ensure their legitimacy, base their claims and policies in discursive language that appeals to “commonly shared and accepted public reasons.”20 Introducing partial, affective, and situated communication into processes governed by the rule of law would produce arbitrariness and capriciousness, potentially reinforcing the power of some groups over others, and thus limiting rather than enhancing social justice. The place for Young’s communicative democracy, Benhabib concludes, is not in the formal deliberation over policy and legislation, but in the social world of “weak” or opinion-making publics: citizens’ forums, associations, and networks, which constitute the complex world of public life. This question is of course particularly important given that certain social groups are, as we have seen, in practice associated with conventionally “nonrational” modes of expression. In these cases, the problem of what kind of speech counts becomes one of the status of the speaking subject. At issue here is not only the mode of expression, but the genre of speech. Some nondeliberative forms of speech cannot by their nature be confined to weak publics, but play a role in formal deliberative bodies. Official apologies, for instance, which call for a response from government, cannot be understood as the kind of speech appropriate only to weak publics. Young and Sanders have examined the status of storytelling and testimony, both of which they argue do not constitute deliberative speech in the terms discussed earlier, and both of which are nevertheless crucial modes of speech for minority communities in public conversations about race. Testimony, like apology and greeting, is perhaps best seen not as “nonrational,” but as an “a-rational” form of speech. Sanders argues that testimony offers a better chance of expressing the particular perspective of historically excluded groups, with unequal access to resources, than does rational deliberation.21 Testimony conveys the specificity of experience; it does not seek communal dialogue, and unlike rational deliberation, it incorporates emotionally charged speech. What the status of testimony and storytelling in fact reveal is the reemergence of the assertion of identity in political discussion—an assertion excluded from rational speech. By providing for the public expression of minority perspectives and experience, testimony legitimizes the testifying subject in public.22 This is particularly clear when we examine not only testimony, but also apology, its invoked dialogical response. Demands for apologies for historical injustice have become a common part of political discourse in plural societies over the past decade.23 The etymology of the


word apology is revealing. Originally, of course, it referred to a speech given in one’s own or another’s defense. Apology in this sense conforms to the rules of rational argument: it follows logic, connects general and particular, and does not reply upon emotional or rhetorical appeal. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates specifically rejects conventional rhetorical flourishes in his statement of self-defense (although his argument is conveyed with passionate rhetorical force).24 Ironically, the latter-day meaning of the word necessarily incorporates a rhetorical gesture. An apology is the acknowledgment of a wrong and expression of regret for it, which aims in some way to repair the wrong; it is performative, an action as well as a statement. Apologies do not essentially involve rational argument. In John Frow’s examination of their speech-act status, he argues that they contain in fact three elements: something happened; it should not have happened; in saying so, I make it up to you.25 The effect of these elements is to acknowledge the interlocutor’s suffering, and the self-understanding of the interlocutor as one who has, crucially, experienced that suffering. Apology greets the aggrieved party by acknowledging the relationship between their experience and their identity. It is the communicative response to testimony, restoring dignity and self-respect to those testifying to suffering. Both testimony and apology establish status and recognition, as is evident in recent cases where apologies have been demanded for historical injustices. Two cases offer helpful examples here. In the late 1990s, a movement for the United States to apologize officially for slavery and segregation gathered momentum in the United States.26 Demands for apology and reparations had a long history in the United States, but were revitalized by the wave of apologies in this period, and particularly the government’s apology and reparations to Japanese Americans. At the same time, widespread grassroots support developed in Australia for an official apology to indigenous Australians for historical mistreatment, and particularly for the practice of forcibly removing children from their families.27 In both cases, demands for apology arose during widespread public discussions of race: President Clinton’s national dialogue on race in the United States,28 and a public reconciliation process in Australia. Those demanding apologies argued that a recognition of past experience was necessary before any further progress could be made in racial dialogue. The movement for apology was particularly popular in Australia, where many local and private bodies apologized for their role in mistreatment of Aboriginal people, and a national “Sorry Day” was organized, in which thousands of people signed apologies. In both Australia and the United States, the federal government refused to officially apologize, arguing that what was required to improve race relations and the situation of racial minorities were social and economic


policies directed at improving current conditions, rather than apologies dealing with events in the past.29 In arguing that an apology would not contribute to dialogue about race relations or reconciliation, and that discussion should center rather on what can be done to improve current material conditions, state officials were essentially denying the relevance of apology as a rational intervention in the discourse surrounding race relations. Rational statements in this conversation were defined as those that made claims about objectively identifiable inequalities, and proposed solutions to them. The significance of the refusal to apologize is particularly clear in the Australian case, where the demand for apology followed the publication in the government report “Bringing Them Home” of several specific narratives of displacement and oppression, by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who had been forcibly removed from their families and communities.30 These narratives were the most widely discussed parts of the report, and offered testimony to experience rather rational argument. (One of the main aims of the report was in fact to allow those who had been stolen for the first time to tell their stories to a wider public.) In the Australian case, unlike the American, the demand for apology was closely linked in public discourse with recent and urgent testimonies of suffering. Activists agreed that apology in itself would not improve material conditions for their people. But it would, they claimed, restore dignity and selfrespect to people by acknowledging and legitimizing their experience and their narratives, and thus placing them on an equal footing with the government as communicative partners. As this suggests, both testimony and apology in this debate were crucial aspects of the expression and recognition of identity—the mutual process of acknowledgment that must precede rational deliberation. They functioned in this sense as greeting, or the process by which, as Young puts it, people acknowledge one another in their particularity.31 It is essential for any subsequent communication to be carried on fairly and equally, and thus must be counted part of legitimate speech in the deliberative process. Recognizing greeting acknowledges the role that power and the conferral of recognition play in deliberative discourse, at least in the limited sphere of setting up the speech situation in which deliberation takes place. Emphasizing both testimony and apology as crucial parts of a nonrational exchange in deliberation, rather than focusing, as most critics have, on testimony alone, reminds us of the intersubjective nature of this form of speech. Echoing the charge I referred to earlier that identity politics makes political negotiation, compromise, and progress impossible, critics have argued that the problem with testimony is that it does not move the deliberative process forward.32 Underlying this is a suspicion that testimony is not deliberative at all—it is simply expression, rather than exchange.


Apology, however, renders testimony intersubjective, and begins the conversation. From this perspective, opposition to an apology for slavery and segregation on the grounds that it might be used as an excuse to refuse to deliver monetary reparations was misguided. The question of reparations was a proper subject for rational deliberation, which could only proceed after parties had been fully recognized through the exchange of testimony and apology. Apology transforms the power relations between deliberating parties, so that they are now acknowledged as equals in the speech situation about to proceed. Moreover, testimony and apology cannot be restricted, as Benhabib suggests, to informal weak publics. The greeting/recognition exchange incorporated in testimony and apology is precedent for public deliberation about race at all levels. In both the Australian and American cases, there were in fact apologies from private individuals and social groups, but demands continued for the federal government in each case to make an official statement. Finally, to understand apologies for historical injustice as acts of recognition, which are the necessary preconditions to deliberation, is not to suggest that they confer upon their addressees the permanent identities of victims.33 Critics of identity politics have argued that its effect is to constrain members of historically disadvantaged groups to seeing themselves as helpless victims, in a final and disabling act of victimization.34 In fact, by conferring recognition, apology allows for the more equal participation in deliberation about current political problems of disadvantaged parties. I have drawn general conclusions about deliberation from the particular case of public discussion of race in this chapter, because political deliberation in the United States, and in fact in all modern democracies takes place in a pluralist and multicultural context. Relations between different race and ethnic groups are key subjects for political debate in the United States, and a theory of deliberation that cannot accommodate them, or answer the challenges they pose, must inevitably fail. At first examination, deliberative democracy would seem to be a paradigm hostile to the liberal politics of identity I have discussed in previous chapters, because of the way in which deliberative democrats have attempted to avoid the question of recognizing identity, by subsuming citizens into the general category of free, equal, and rational citizens. On the other hand, deliberation offers a better model of the democratic process for a liberal theory of identity politics, because it recognizes the political status of identity, rather than subsuming it into interest. (From the perspective of interest pluralism, there is no reason why members of identity groups need express or represent their own interests—this could be done by benevolent others.) I conclude here that a revised deliberative politics, incorporating recognition, here in the form of testimony and apology can in fact include identity fully in the deliberative process.


Representation in the Deliberative Process I have argued earlier on largely theoretical grounds for recasting the democratic process as deliberative, so as to incorporate identity groups along liberal lines. To implement this in practice, however, raises practical questions concerning participation and representation. In this section I examine the implications of group recognition in deliberation for systems of election to formal legislative bodies, and for other fora in which political debate takes place. In the deliberative paradigm for democratic politics, the fora in which deliberation takes place may be divided into formal legislative bodies, and the informal or weak publics, which shape and transmit opinion to the stronger publics.35 The distinction between these should not be overdrawn; in the case of deliberation about race, a formal apology was required to facilitate deliberation in both weak and strong publics. In this section, I examine the role of identity groups in deliberation at both levels, and conclude that it is the more informal public fora which offer the best opportunity for identity groups to express their perspective and influence opinion. Melissa Williams has dealt extensively with the problem of representing marginalized groups in the electoral process in Voice, Trust and Memory, in which she defends a form of group representation on the grounds that ascribed group identity provides a distinctive voice, defined by the common memory of subordination, and that citizens are more likely to trust their representatives who are also group members.36 Williams constructs her defense in opposition to the prevailing liberal system of representation, which fails to adequately represent historically subordinated groups. Liberal representation (as currently understood) is based, as Williams describes, on two fundamental ideas: first, each citizen has an equal vote in free and fair elections, and second, citizens can aggregate their interests (preferences) to influence elected representatives, in the system of interest group pluralism I discussed earlier in Dahl’s work, and here earlier.37 As Williams points out, this second strand of liberal thinking on representation provides the political sociology that identifies the groups to be recognized in the political process—a political sociology at odds with her own analysis of marginalized groups, and with my defense of identity groups. In fact, liberal representation is potentially compromised in its own terms, because the equality of persons may be undermined if a minority has disproportionate ability to mobilize in support of its interests, or simply holds its interests and preferences with an intensity that produces disproportionate political influence. This contradiction is exacerbated, as Williams points out, by geographic districting.38 But the key problem with the liberal approach to fair representation is that it defines identity in terms of interests. As I have argued in earlier chapters, a focus on interest rather


than identity fails to account for the public status of identity claims made by social groups, and for the political significance of recognition. Williams’s definition of minority groups as those who have a shared experience, giving rise to a distinctive point of view, which merits self-representation, is consistent with my own definition of a liberal approach to identity, rather than interest groups. As Mill asserted in his defense of extending suffrage to the working class, these groups cannot adequately be represented by benevolent outsiders (as T.H. Green assumed in the case of women). Williams concludes, in the case of women: “It means that women are often best represented by other women, as they have an understanding of what equality means for them that is not readily available to men.”39 We need not conclude from this that all women have the same interests—women can interpret their shared experience in different ways, the point here being that the representation and contestation of their experience cannot be carried out by men. Williams argues for a group-based model of fair representation, which incorporates representation as mediation, and which more equitably includes marginalized groups. In practice, there exists in various countries a number of possible electoral devices and systems that either formally incorporate particular groups, or allow for their voluntary self-representation. In New Zealand, indigenous Maori voters can register to vote not on the general roll, but on a separate Maori roll that elects a specified number of Maori representatives, the number of which is proportional to the selfidentified Maori population of New Zealand.40 (A similar system of reserved seats has been favored by the indigenous Aboriginal people of Australia.41) In the American state of Maine, Native Americans from the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes have the right to elect a representative each to the state legislature, however, these representatives cannot vote in the legislature as a whole, as those who elect them also vote for representatives in the general election. These representatives have a deliberative, but not a determining role in the formulation of legislation.42 In all of these cases, the reserved seats are for indigenous communities, which Williams ascribes to the fact that it is only in these cases that the divisions between the minority group and the mainstream are regarded as permanent. As I argued in chapter four, however, the singling out of indigenous communities for group recognition in fact reflects the redefinition of pluralism by multiculturalist liberals in national terms. It further assumes either the homogeneity of indigenous national groups, or that subgroups within indigenous communities have equal chances of being represented in set-aside seats. Consociationalist theories, which guarantee the representation of minorities in the machinery of government run into the same problem, and again, these are forms of government that have applied to countries in which there are more than one major ethnic and linguistic (essentially national) group (Belgium, Switzerland, and The Netherlands).


As several commentators have argued, a system of proportional representation system (PR) offers a better and more flexible way to include a large and shifting range of identity groups that are self-identified by citizens rather than fixed in law.43 Such systems have been implemented to various degrees at the local level in the United States and, as Williams points out, have been quite successful in achieving the representation of racial and ethnic minorities. PR does not fix the minority groups entitled to representation, but allows these to emerge and disappear as historical conditions change. Of course, proportional representation systems do not alter the structural inequalities that potentially make it difficult for marginalized groups to mobilize and seek political office under any system of representation, but they do remove the additional barriers to representation that inhere in the system as it now stands. The traditional problem of the accountability of representatives to electors is particularly salient in the situation of minority representation, either in fixed seats set aside, or under a PR system. As Anne Phillips has pointed out, this is particularly a problem with deliberation, because of the different levels at which deliberation operates. If elected representatives deliberate together and change their positions, are they still faithful to the groups that elect them?44 Requiring too great a degree of accountability, however, runs the risk of assuming that constituents’ interests are homogeneous and too permanently fixed. The deliberative process operates on a range of public levels, and assumes that opinions formed in discussion at the wider community level will continue to be debated and deliberated at the legislative level. But what this concern suggests is that the full representation of minority groups in deliberation over policy is often easier to achieve at the level of local communities than in a national, or even state context. The more local the political forum, the less representation becomes an issue, and the more likely it is that members of marginalized groups will be able to speak directly to their concerns.45 Moreover, focusing on local communities has the advantage of more immediate relevance. It is not likely that a proportional representation electoral system will be adopted at the national or state level in the United States. And even if cases where there is some support for PR, it is generally limited, for reasons I discussed earlier, to indigenous communities. Liberal identity politics requires a broader system, through which a range of identity groups can seek expression and representation. Deliberation and Oversight at the Community Level There are several issue areas in which minority communities have sought and achieved formal inclusion in policy making at the local level. Beginning in 1964 with the passage of the Equal Opportunity Act, community-action programs serving low-income communities were encouraged to “develop,


conduct and administer programs with the maximum feasible participation of residents of the area and members of the groups served.”46 In one important and controversial expression of this, movements for community control over public schools have sought direct political power for local neighborhoods, in most cases those with substantial racial and ethnic minority populations who felt they were not being adequately consulted and included by predominantly white school board administrators.47 At the level of local government, a more flexible approach is possible, in which groups are recognized on a case-by-case basis, and are able to participate in debate over particular policy issues that affect them. This strategy is already being pursued to some extent in the widespread practice by which local government authorities invite submission, consultation, and participation in decision making about local development on the part of interested minority groups.48 Good examples of the potential here, and its imperfect achievement, are the civilian review boards, which monitor police actions, and which now exist in about 200 cities in the United States. The work of these boards is mixed, and their most immediate role is not strictly deliberative, but rather the investigation of individual community complaints about police practices. However, the boards also discuss and comment upon police practices, and recommend policy changes to prevent abuses. In this sense, they fulfil a deliberative, as well as an oversight function.49 In most cases, members of these boards are selected by the mayor or city council members with considerable discretion, but in order to achieve community legitimacy, they must include representatives from local minority communities. Historically, civilian review boards have generally been instituted as a result of community pressure following controversial incidents involving the police, and minority representation is essential.50 The formal requirements for representing diverse identity groups in the local community differ, although the legislation establishing such boards usually specifies that they reflect at least the racial and ethnic composition of the community. The St. Paul, Minnesota Police Civilian Internal Affairs Review Commission, for example, as five civilian members, including one woman, one African American, one Hispanic, and one gay person. The seven Minneapolis board members consist of three African Americans, three whites, and one Native American.51 Arrangements for ensuring the actual numbers of minority board members are informal, however, and at the discretion of local government. (Often one or two members may also volunteer themselves for service.) Consequently, local attitudes toward identity groups are likely to be reflected in the composition of boards. In most cases, this has worked well for African Americans and Native Americans in particular. Gays and lesbians, however, have been much less successful in securing group representation on civilian review boards, although they have actively


sought these as a part of a strategy of lobbying for group recognition at the local level, along the lines of ethnic groups.52 In Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, when a citizens police review panel was set up in 1999, African Americans and gay and lesbian groups requested that they be given priority as groups in nominating Panel members, due to the history of police victimization of blacks and homosexuals in the city. The request for gay and lesbian representation was denied by the City Council.53 When the Panel was set up, its members included several minorities, some of whom were sympathetic to the problems and needs of the gay and lesbian community when it came to policing, but there were no actual members of the community on the panel. More recently, the city of Cincinnati offers a good example of the way in which identity groups have sought, and to some extent achieved, greater representation and participation not only in community oversight boards, but also in political deliberation and decision making at the local level in a range of counter-publics. Because the developments here took place in the immediate wake of racial violence and conflict, this case also demonstrates the importance of testimony and apology in establishing the grounds for group participation in deliberation. Race riots broke out in Cincinnati in April 2001, in the wake of the fatal shooting by police of Timothy Thomas, an unarmed African American man whom they were pursuing. The killing was the latest in a series of fatal shootings of African Americans by police officers in this heavily segregated city, and the African American community reacted angrily. A number of demonstrations were organized, and riots lasting several days broke out in the inner-city neighborhood where the shooting had taken place.54 Mayor Luken condemned the violence and imposed a curfew, but also formally and publicly apologized to Thomas’s family for his killing.55 After the unrest subsided, the city government set up an advisory group, Cincinnati Community Action Now (CAN), charged with proposing programs to improve race relations and the social and economic situation of African Americans in the city. Black representatives from different sections of the African American community, including business and churches, were included in the group, along with city council members and local business leaders.56 Cincinnati CAN organized “action teams” comprising a diverse range of community representatives, charged with formulating and identifying programs targeted to the needs of local African Americans, and with running a series of public debates and conversations about race issues in the city.57 In a partnership with the local newspaper and educational and social groups, it sponsored “Neighbor to Neighbor”—a six-month series of neighborhood meetings to discuss race. Personal testimony about racism played an important role in these deliberative fora.58 While debate about the


responsiveness of the city council to these initiatives continues, several specific programs aimed at improving police treatment of minorities, providing better social and educational services to minorities, and increasing employment opportunities have developed out of these local conversations, and have been sponsored by Cincinnati CAN.59 Conclusion The community dialogue about race is a more recent example of the national conversations sponsored by Clinton in the late 1990s, and one with much more widespread community and institutional support. In terms of deliberative democracy, the dialogue establishes a network of weak and strong publics in which deliberation about race occurs after the communication of greeting, testimony, and in some cases, apology. In the Cincinnati case, an official apology for the killing of Thomas was demanded early on by African American activists, and was offered by the Mayor despite some mainstream community opposition. While the process of community debate in Cincinnati has had its problems, the city’s apology for the shooting conferred a legitimacy upon it, which was lacking in the wider national context, and which has made it more possible for deliberation to produce actual programs and policy reforms. As this demonstrates, there is considerable potential for minority identity groups to participate in deliberation over policies directly affecting them at the local level. The drawback to community oversight and discussion group panels is that they inevitably favor those identity groups that have more voice in community politics, and are more capable of influencing elected representatives. The difficulties Cincinnati gays and lesbians faced in having members of their groups included on the new police review board reflects traditionally homophobic attitudes in this city. In some ways this reverses the problem noted in the discussion of PR: that the system could provide more voice for a range of identity groups, but would not solve the problem that better organized and funded groups would find it easier to draw electoral support. In the case of group participation in counterpublics, funding and access to resources are less of a problem than convincing local officials of legitimacy. From the perspective of liberal identity politics, an arrangement in which local government officials nominate members is less desirable than a formal process of selection, in which groups representing members who had particular policy concerns are guaranteed representation in deliberative bodies. This would also enhance the legitimacy of such bodies in the community—a particularly important consideration given that consultative and deliberative bodies usually are formed as the result of community


dissatisfaction and unrest. Interestingly, while theorists have identified the main problem with community discussion as that of ensuring that privileged participants fully understand the experience of marginalized others,60 many actual participants in the conversations about race in Cincinnati listed as their main criticism the difficulty in persuading members of minority groups to participate at all.61 The problems of deliberation may be less in the character of deliberative exchange, and more in ensuring that all affected parties are actually present in the process. I have concentrated in this chapter on the representation of identity groups in deliberation about race because this is such a fundamental and long-standing problem for politics in the United States and other pluralist democracies. But race in the United States, like indigenous origin, is often taken to be a special case. A viable liberal identity politics must apply also to groups that cannot be seen in national terms. The relative lack of success of gays and lesbians in securing representation of their community members on police review boards suggests that the liberal group recognition is still largely confined to ethnic or national groups. In chapter six, I examine another case that demonstrates the same bias in favor of ethnicity, which has been characteristic of liberal politics under pluralism. In the case of Muslims in Western countries, the political claims of an identity group have been interpreted as either ethnic-national or ethical, and as a result, demands for recognition and status have gone largely unheard.


Chapter Six Cultural Recognition and the Claims of Muslim Immigrant Communities

As we saw in chapter five, some identity groups have been quite successful in securing formal roles in policy making and discussion at the local government level. By far the majority of these cases deal with African Americans, however, with other local ethnic groups such as Hispanics and Native Americans also gaining some recognition in areas where they constitute substantial proportions of the population. Gays and lesbians have particularly requested formal representation on community review of policing bodies, because of the high incidence of complaints lodged by gay and lesbian groups of police mistreatment. They have, however, in most cases been unsuccessful. I have argued that this is because the recognition of identity groups in the political process has been limited to ethnic minorities, while groups like gays and lesbians continue to be defined as voluntary associations, whose members are grouped together by their “lifestyle choices.” The assumption that membership in them is chosen, has precluded these bodies from being recognized as essential to the construction and shape of individual identities and lives. In this chapter I return to the question of recognition more generally, rather than focusing on specific decision- and policy-making bodies. I examine another case where a nonethnic identity group has struggled to become recognized as a fundamental constituent of individual identity, tracing both the shifts in attitudes toward identity within groups, and the conflicts and tensions engendered with the mainstream society as a consequence. I look at the case of Muslim communities in Western societies, particularly in the United States and Britain, which have recently sought recognition as cultural communities based on religion, with varying degrees of success. In these cases, as we shall see, Muslims have, from the 1980s, struggled to distinguish themselves from ethnic immigrant communities recognized in the public sphere. Before this shift (and still to a large degree


in France), Muslims, as distinct from Arabs and other nationalities, were regarded as a voluntary group sharing interests and particular moral views, rather than as an identity group based on a common culture. Consequently, their political claims have often been treated as a competing range of moral positions, to be debated and rebutted, rather than as any kind of demand for status.1 This is particularly clear in the issue of Muslim dress for women. The case of Muslim groups demonstrates two of the pluralist confusions that I have argued run through modern liberal thinking about diversity: first, the confusion between value pluralism and identity pluralism, and second, the assumption that ethnicity or nationality constitutes a uniquely significant source of individual identity. Because of these confusions, political debate between the social mainstream and Muslims in Western societies has often been beset with frustration and misunderstanding. The mainstream, non-Muslim community has tended to treat Muslim claims as if they were simply moral positions on a range of social issues and relations, and evaluates and responds to them in such terms. Muslims, for the most part, make claims as expressions of group identity, which they wish to have recognized. As we shall see, however, Muslims themselves have only recently formulated their group identity in religious–cultural, rather than ethnic terms, and this shift has produced its own (particularly generational) tensions. I begin here by discussing this recent shift as it has played out through the 1990s, and particularly since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in Britain, the United States, and Canada. I then turn to the specific case of Muslim women and the veil, which has had the largest impact in France, but has also emerged to a lesser extent in other countries. In all of these, to varying degrees, the status of women has called into question the status of Muslims, as either the defenders of antidemocratic and illiberal views, on the one hand, or as a complex community and culture on the other. Muslims in the West: The Transition from Ethnicity to Religion Relations between Muslim immigrants and their host Western societies have attracted particular media attention since the 2001 terrorist attacks, but this in fact marks only the latest stage in a complex and often fraught relationship.2 Muslims have constituted significant minorities in the states I examine here since the 1970s, and Islam is now the second largest religion in North American and Europe, mainly as a result of recent immigration from former Western colonies. Muslims represent a range of different ethnic and regional cultures, dispersed throughout Western societies, but in concentrations reflecting particular historical circumstances. Most French Muslims are from North Africa, where they arrived in significant numbers

cultural recognition / 115

after the Algerian War of Independence. Most in Britain come from South Asia; in the United States most Muslims have historically been Arabs, but the largest and most recent arrivals are from South Asia. There is also in the United States a substantial population of African American Muslims. The relationship between ethnicity and religion complicates identifying particularly Muslim or Islamic cultural practices and mores: as we shall see in the context of the veil, attitudes and habits often reflect national or ethnic cultural practices as much as religion. Since the 1990s, many younger Muslims in the West have sought to establish a communal identity on the basis of religion rather than ethnicity, at times legitimizing that communal religious identity by explicitly rejecting what they perceive to be “unIslamic” ethnic cultural practices. This trend has corresponded with the flourishing of new Muslim community organizations. Many of these are based around Internet sites and popular magazines, rather than around the traditional ethnic mosque. The claims of Muslims for recognition of their status as an identity group have varied in their success in different Western countries not only because of factors particular to the Muslim community (notably age, class, level of education, and culture of origin), but also as a result of attitudes and policies within the host country toward cultural pluralism in general. European countries have tended to react to the cultural diversity produced by Muslim immigrants (who often came originally as temporary guest-workers) with more concern and suspicion, because these states have less historical experience of immigration.3 This is less true of the United States and Canada, with their historical experiences of cultural and racial diversity, and to some extent of Britain, where the long history and character of imperial rule resulted in much greater interaction between colonizers and the colonized. The shape taken by newly emerging Muslim identity groups reflects these differing contexts of state policy. Although I discuss European countries, particularly France and the controversy over Muslim dress, my main focus here is on Britain, the United States, and Canada. All these are states expressly committed to pluralism, with concepts of “hyphenated citizenship,” in which a “thick” cultural identity coexists with a political identity expressed primarily through commitment to common political goals, institutions, and procedures. In the case of Britain, extensive immigration from former colonies, up until the 1960s, created substantial populations of British citizens who were not AngloCeltic. In the United States, immigrants have long struggled to express separate ethnic identities, and the civil rights and antiracist struggles of African Americans have established models for the expression and recognition of communal and racial difference. Canada expressly committed itself to state support for multiculturalism in legislation in 1988. In France, however, cultural pluralism is understood almost entirely as a threat to republican


principles, and it is in France, as we shall see, that the issue of the Muslim veil has been played by its critics as a challenge to French national identity. In this case we see not only the displacement of ethnic identities by religion, but also the conflict between a shared national culture and set of values on one hand, and a particularist community of identification on the other. In Britain, the Muslim population is 1.8 million, making them the largest religious group after Christians. There have been substantial numbers of Muslims in Britain since the 1950s, when members of former colonies moved there for work as the postwar economy expanded. They have identified themselves, and have been identified by the state, along ethnic lines, into particular ethnic communities. Only recently have British Muslims begun to contest the primacy of racial identity, and the racial assumptions of multiculturalism, and to express demands for cultural recognition as Muslims.4 As Tariq Modood comments, this assertion of religious identity has come as something of a shock in Britain, as Muslims as a group “catch up” with the more mainstream claims of multiculturalism and feminism.5 Modood writes: “To many Muslim activists, the misplacing of Muslims into ‘race’ categories and the belatedness with which the severe disadvantages of the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have come to be recognized mean that race relations are perceived as an inappropriate policy niche for Muslims, and at worst as a conspiracy to prevent the emergence of a specifically Muslim socio-political formation.”6 British Muslims had started to organize and call for recognition of their minority rights from the start of the 1980s, at the same time as they began to participate in the public sphere, for example, running for and serving in local government, as representatives of a religious minority.7 The Rushdie case, which I discussed in chapter one, had a galvanizing effect on the emergence of Muslim identity. In response to the publication of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Muslim protests, and the strong backlash in the media and wider society, second-generation Muslims articulated their identity more strongly than had their parents, and demanded that the legal sanction of blasphemy apply also to Islam. While this demand was ultimately unsuccessful, the Rushdie affair resulted in the emergence of a Muslim “public sphere,” in which Muslim identity in Britain could be represented and contested. A public debate on Muslim identity emerged amongst academics and social researchers, and amongst artists, some of whom began to write from articulated positions of Muslim self-identification.8 The sense of Muslim identity emerged in a complex relationship with the wider social context, functioning both as a trigger for increased hostility toward and prejudice against Muslims and as a response to it. In 1996, the Runnymede Trust, an independent charity supporting research into race and ethnicity established the Commission on British Muslims and


Islamophobia. The Commission published its report the following year, concluding that anti-Muslim prejudice had grown rapidly in recent years, and suggesting 60 policy recommendations to deal with “Islamophobia.” Chief amongst these was that the law penalize antireligious violence and discrimination on the same ground as that motivated by racism. A key concern for Muslims has been that they as a group until recently were not legally protected from discrimination, because they were not accepted by the courts as an ethnic group, although Jews and Sikhs were classed as such.9 In 1999, Muslim peers called for the extension of the Race Relations Act to cover religious discrimination. After some consideration, the current Labour government refused, however, arguing that attacks on Muslims are motivated by racist hostility, and can adequately be dealt with under the existing law.10 It was only with the passage of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001, that attacks or harassment motivated by religious hatred were specifically criminalized. In the same year, religious identification was listed for the first time as a question in the census.11 The effect of September 11 was to increase public awareness of Muslim groups, and of their demands for recognition, even further. Iftikhar H. Malik writes that after September 11: “[E]ducated and concerned Muslims rejected and openly criticized the usually derogatory portrayal of Muslims as terrorists and anti-intellectual mobs and—though haphazardly—began to reorganise themselves into some kind of Jewish model of identity which will allow a loose and inclusive definition of being Muslim.”12 Community groups increased in visibility, and began to participate in local government consultations on community relations.13 The terrorist attacks also, of course, produced an increase in Islamophobia, and in public arguments that Islam was incompatible with Western values. Earlier that same year, there had been extensive riots in cities in the northwest of England involving young Pakistani immigrants, and this had already contributed to mainstream fear and alienation from Muslim minorities. Thirty percent of British Muslims reported incidents involving hostility toward themselves or their families in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks.14 After September 11, a number of Muslims were detained on suspicion of being terrorists, although Prime Minister Blair, like President Bush, made several public statements explicitly rejecting the notion that the war on terror was a war on Islam. Blair even referred to “so-called fundamentalists,” thus distancing himself from any suggestion that militancy and terrorism necessarily followed from scriptural fundamentalism.15 A survey conducted by the Islamic Society of Great Britain, a year after the terrorist attacks, found that 80 percent of Britons believed that there was now more suspicion of Muslims as a group, although 84 percent believed that Muslims and nonMuslims could live together peacefully. It’s revealing that 79 percent


believed that immigrants settling in Britain did not have to reject their native culture, which suggests that for those framing and answering the question, being Muslim had been accepted as a cultural identity.16 Under pressure of increased “Islamophobia,” the British Muslim community became more influenced by what sociologists referred to as “Islamism”: the view that all aspects of life could be understood and organized from an Islamic perspective.17 This movement has been particularly influential amongst young, urban, educated Muslims, many of whom are critical of what they see as their parents’ ethnic and unIslamic practices.18 A recent survey showed that 41 percent of Muslims under 34 said they defined themselves first and foremost as Muslim, compared with 30 percent of over-35s.19 While critics often assume Islamism to be conservative, the political positions it produces are not easy to characterize ideologically. One of its results has been the development of what Pnina Werbner describes as “gendered disaporic public sphere in which [Muslim] women’s collective voice has to be taken seriously by men.”20 This public sphere is clearly evident in the development of recent social groups and websites like Q-News, which is edited by a young (hijab wearing) Muslim woman. The group at which this site is directed is clearly urban, well educated and sophisticated, and openly Muslim. The wearing of hijab is defended, but the voices of non-veiled Muslim women are also presented. The magazine presents a strong critique of paternalist and patriarchal practices and customs in Q-News publications, on the grounds that they reflect unmodernized ethnic cultural practices rather than Islam. Muslims are also the second largest and fastest growing religious community in the United States, numbering 4–6 million. There is an African American Muslim community, constituting 30–43 percent of the Muslim population, which is still regarded with some suspicion by Muslim immigrants.21 (In turn, African American Muslims, who have a strong sense of distinct cultural identity associated with struggles against segregation and the oppression of blacks, have resented the increased influence in Muslim groups of South Asian immigrants, who tend to be economically well off and more easily identified as “white.”22) In addition to African American Muslims, immigrant communities have been subject to the same ethnic distinctions as those in Britain, and have also tended to identify until recently more along ethnic lines. Immigrant Muslims in the United States were mainly Arabs until the 1970s, when significant numbers arrived from South Asia, as well as many from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The community has grown substantially from the 1970s, partly as a result of the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965 (and partly as a result of the Nation of Islam moving to mainstream Islamic teachings). It has also become more publicly visible: many mosques and Islamic schools were built in this period, and several Muslim public affairs groups have emerged.23


As a religious group, Muslims have been visible and active since the 1980s, and it is only from around this period that “Muslims” came to be used as an identity category. Previously most Muslim immigrants to the United States were from the Middle East and were generically referred to as “Arabs.”24 Post-1965 Muslim immigrants, however, not only came from a wider range of countries, but also tended to be better educated and more securely middle class. Yvonne Haddad writes that the post-1965 Muslim immigrants “found unacceptable the assimilation with US culture that earlier immigrants had made. They emphasized difference and distinctiveness as the marks of being Muslim, and saw them as the means of ensuring the survival of the community and the perpetuation of their faith in the next generation.”25 Moreover, in a revival of cultural pluralism, many groups in the United States at this point were asserting specific identities. The Muslim Student Association (MSA), formed in 1963, played an important role in the construction of a common Muslim identity by drawing in large numbers of graduate students who would go on to professional careers and continued involvement in Muslim community life. In 1976, the MSA set up American Trust Publications to produce Islamic literature for Muslims. Its publications include textbooks, reference works, and a “cultural orientation” series that consists of fiction and nonfiction designed to encourage the Muslim child to appreciate Muslim culture. From the 1980s, Muslims in the United States have used the idea of the umma, the community of believers, to carve out their own space of identity against Western ideologies and ethnic minority status.26 As in Britain, and also under the influence of Islamism, there has developed, amongst the second generation, a critique of their parents’ practices and cultures as “ethnic,” rather than authentically Muslim. Like young British Muslims, second-generation Americans from India interviewed by Garbi Schmidt express disappointment with their Indian heritage. Several compared their parents’ and relatives’ attitudes toward material excess to dominant American beliefs, constructing themselves as distinctive. As Schmidt comments of one young woman: “She is not an immigrant, she is not an Indian, and she is not entirely an American either. What she is, is a Muslim.”27 Some second-generation Muslims are rejecting both their culture of origin and mainstream American culture and choosing Islam as a cultural, not just a religious alternative. Karen Leonard notes that Muslim community leaders she interviewed described the same shift amongst the young to a new identity independent of ethnic origin.28 While we can trace in the United States a similar shift in self-identification from ethnicity to religion to that we noted in the British case,29 and although cultural diversity emerged as a social value at around the same time in both countries, there are important differences in the wider social


context in which American Muslims are shaping their emerging identity. The emergence of a distinctive Muslim cultural community has been shaped by what Nathan Glazer calls the “American ethnic pattern”30: a model for identity assertion followed by a range of groups, including those representing gender and sexuality. However, while cultural communities in the United States are often encouraged to maintain their difference, and to contribute to diversity, there exist no state policies to support the maintenance of ethnic cultures (and of course none to support religious groups). As Leonard comments: “People must mobilize themselves, and here ‘identity entrepreneurs’ can help create and police ethnic or communal boundaries.”31 In this context, many Muslim claims for equal recognition in the United States have taken the form of specific complaints of discrimination, concerning for example, the wearing of religious dress, or the provision of halal food.32 Several have had recourse to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to assert their rights to freedom of religious practice. While at one level these complaints are presented as assertions of individual right, they have also helped shape the emergence of a recognized Muslim identity group. Kathleen Moore describes the role played by several legal cases along these lines. In an Appeals Court case in New Jersey, for example, the court reviewed the First Amendment claims of two Newark police officers who were Muslims, and who wore beards in compliance with Islamic requirements. An Imam testified that the Qu’ran does indeed require men to wear beards. As Moore describes, in discussing this testimony, the court treated it as demonstrating that Islam is not “a transcendent belief system, but . . . a set of ritual practices of traditional origin that apply to Muslims and not to others.”33 This recalls one of the chief criteria for identifying a cultural community that I discussed in chapter one. As in Britain, American Muslim efforts to define a communal identity have been directed not only at distinguishing themselves from ethnic membership, but also at responding from an organized position to prejudice and hostility in the wider population. During the 1990s, Muslims began to become involved in American politics, in both the Democratic and Republican parties.34 Also in this period, several active community organizations were formed, such as the American Muslim Council, which publicly advocated for the community, and commented from a Muslim perspective on a range of social and political issues. As Agha Saeed writes: “In the 1950s and 1960s, the main issue for the major (agenda-setting) Muslim organizations was the prevention of forced assimilation. By the 1990s, the problem to be solved became the removal of barriers lying between American Muslims and mainstream America. These barriers include stereotyping, vilification, discrimination, exclusion, prohibition and double standards.” The Muslim community had begun to put down American roots. “In a carefully


negotiated framework of continuity and change, of identity preservation and boundary negotiation, Muslim organizations are beginning to trace the history of Islam in America.”35 The retelling of group history constitutes another marker in the emergence of a cultural community. This identification of young Muslims along religious, rather than ethnic lines, has (perhaps ironically) been encouraged by the anti-Muslim comments and diatribes that were publicized throughout the 1990s, and which characterized Islam as a cultural community—Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis being the best known of these.36 Anti-Islam critiques flourished after the September 11 attacks, and much of the newly gained legitimacy in the wider society achieved by Muslim community groups during the 1990s was badly damaged.37 There was a rash of physical and verbal attacks against Muslim Americans. In the US, 200, 000 Muslims have been interviewed since the attacks, thousands required to register themselves, and hundreds detained, despite President Bush’s assertions that the United States was not at war with Islam or Muslims.38 Several charitable organizations were alleged to be supporting terrorism, and closed down. However there were also increased calls for dialogue with Muslims, and there was in fact a surge of interest in Muslim culture and history. School districts began to include Muslims in their diversity curricula, along with ethnic groups.39 From the Muslim perspective, young Muslims called for greater community organization and unity.40 In the final national case I examine in this section, that of Canada, there has been much less research into the social attitudes and activities of Muslims. However, the same general trend of increasing Muslim visibility and identification may be observed, though in a shorter time frame, and in the context of state-sponsored multiculturalism. Canadian Muslims have now emerged as a group in Canada’s “multi-ethnic public sphere.”41 Until the 1980s, the Muslim community in Canada was small, and drawn primarily from the Middle East and South Asia. Social organization was predominantly along ethnic lines.42 After discriminatory immigration legislation was removed in 1967, Muslim immigration increased, and the population of Muslims in Canada more than tripled between 1981 and 2001, as a result of diverse immigration. There are now an estimated 600, 000 Muslims in Canada, making Islam the nation’s second most popular religion. Also in this period, multiculturalism as a policy in Canada became institutionalized and enshrined in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988. The Act supports the promotion of the diverse cultures of the Canadian people, and commits the government to supporting diverse cultural projects. Because the Act includes religion as a source of diversity, Muslims have been recognized as a cultural community separate from ethnic/national groups from an early stage. Muslims are represented on the


advisory boards of several federal institutions, and the Canadian Muslim Society and the Council of Muslim Community of Canada were asked by the education ministry in Ontario to participate in developing suggestions for authors and publishers who could produce materials for schools.43 There has been a similar proliferation of Muslim community organizations in Canada as we noted in the American case, but in Canada, community groups tend to be more integrated into the decision-making process. Finally, the generational change noted in the American and British cases is also apparent here: younger Muslims are more likely to identify along religious lines, and to reject their parents’ cultural practices on the grounds that they are “ethnic,” rather than Islamic. I discuss this in more detail in what follows in the context of Muslim women and the veil. Muslim Women and Veiling Anxieties about the emergence and consolidation of immigrant Muslim communities in the West have been expressed particularly strongly over the wearing of veils, and various forms of Islamic dress by women.44 As I argue here, the issue of the veil or hijab demonstrates the distinction of religious from national/ethnic cultural communities, which I have outlined earlier, but even more clearly, the tension between moral pluralism and identity pluralism. The position of women, and the discrimination and oppression they allegedly experience under Islam has been a focus of Western criticism, leading critics to conclude that Islam consists in a range of regressive and antidemocratic social attitudes and practices, from which those subject to it must be rescued. For Western critics, Muslim political claims stake out repugnant moral positions. For many Muslim women, however, as we shall see, the veil constitutes the expression of their fundamental identities as members of a cultural and religious community. At one level, the increased popularity of the veil in immigrant societies reflects trends in the broader Muslim world. There has been a “reveiling” or recovering movement amongst Islamic women in predominantly Muslim countries since the 1970s.45 As Katherine Bullock notes, this movement emerged relatively suddenly: during the 1960s, headcoverings all but disappeared in many Muslim countries, in a trend hailed by local elites as reflecting economic and social modernization (Turkey has forbidden veiling in the name of modernization since the 1920s). The movement has gradually spread to Muslim communities in the West, where it has been greeted with dismay in an unusually wide range of quarters, from Western liberals and feminists to traditional nationalists and opponents of immigration. It is generally assumed by non-Muslims that the wearing of hijab must be forced upon women, or is at best a choice that they would not make if


they possessed real options, and that it prevents their full agency in the public sphere.46 The image of the veil as a symbol of both women’s oppression and general cultural backwardness is a venerable one, as Leila Ahmed has shown, with its roots in Western imperialism, and in the assertion of the superiority of Western European, over Arabic cultures.47 The historical symbolism of the veil now underlies a more general perception in the West that Muslim women are victimized and oppressed.48 As Nancy Hirschmann points out, this image has been exacerbated by recent political events: reports of the oppressive practices of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Saudi restrictions on American women soldiers in the Gulf War.49 At the same time as veiling was surging in popularity in Western countries, the burqa and the oppression of women it represented to the west played a key role in legitimizing U.S. military action in Afghanistan. In the Western media, the image of the veil performs a range of functions: it suggests the subjection of women, while also eroticizing them,50 as well as symbolizing dangerous Islamic fundamentalism. According to Bullock, “For the western media, hijab, by and large, stands for oppression, and as shorthand for all the horrors of Islam (now called Islamic fundamentalism): terrorism, violence, barbarity and backwardness.”51 While veiling amongst immigrant Muslim communities has increased in popularity at the same time as it has in Muslim societies, it’s important to note that the reasons for the increased interest amongst women in veiling are not always the same in Western countries as in predominantly Muslim countries. In the West, the decision to wear the veil is a statement made by women who are interacting in, and responding to a mainstream Western cultural and social environment. Wearing the hijab in non-Muslim countries has implications for how women are able to move in public space in this environment, and consequently, for how they will be treated both by other Muslims and by members of the dominant culture. My concern here is with the reasons women choose to wear various forms of the veil, rather than its controversial status and legitimacy as a religious obligation. It must be noted, however, that there has been considerable debate amongst Muslim scholars as to whether or not veiling is actually a religious requirement in Islam. This issue cannot now be seen separately from the controversy that has been generated by the veil in immigrant communities, because of the ways in which its defenders have responded to Western critiques. In the face of Western resistance to the veil, Muslim women who wish to wear it have emphasized their piety, and appealed to values of freedom of religious expression. When the French government was considering its recent legislation prohibiting the wearing of headscarves in schools, it was pointed out that the legislation would also prevent the wearing of large Christian crosses and Jewish yarmulkes. Several French Muslims


responded that the hijab was different from these, in that it was a religious obligation. In fact, most scholars agree that there is some ambiguity in the Qur’an on this: women are enjoined to dress modestly, to cover their bodies, and to dress differently from nonbelieving women.52 Particular forms of dress, however, are not specified. In fact, modes of dress differ widely in different Muslim cultures and countries, and reflect cultural practices and history. Further, there is debate over the status of various Qur’anic pronouncements and hadiths (reports of the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad).53 In any case, studies of veiled women have shown that religious observance for many women who choose the veil is closely tied with wishing to publicly identify as a Muslim.54 The renewed popularity of veiling has coincided with the increased Western public concern about the political and social presence of Muslim minorities in immigrant countries. As more Muslim immigrant women in the West wear the veil, controversy arises over two distinct but related issues. First, the status of women in gender hierarchies, and second, the status of a newly emerging social group that is making a claim for expression and recognition in public space. As we shall see, opponents of the veil, while responding to it overtly as a symbol of (alleged) moral attitudes toward women, are also motivated by concern about what they see as the militant and fundamentalist demands of Islamic identity politics. Identity claims on the part of Muslim women are met thus with moral and political arguments about the status of women at one level, and responses to the perceived identity claims of militant Muslim men on the other. These confusions in pluralism emerge most clearly in the case of France, where the issue has come to a head over the past few years, centered around the wearing of the hijab in public schools. The French case has generated international controversy, and it is impossible to discuss veiling in immigrant communities without referring to it, but we must note that there are several factors that make it distinctive. Most obviously, France is one of the few Western nations where the central government has legally prohibited the veil in certain public institutions.55 Further and crucially, France has never adopted a policy of multiculturalism, and assumes that all immigrants will assimilate. On the liberal Left, cultural group identification has been regarded as contrary to French republicanism, socially disintegrative, and even conducive to Fascism.56 Finally, the separation between church and state in France, laïcité, is strictly applied, and is taken to mean not that the state must remain neutral between religions, but that religious expression is prohibited in any public space associated with or supported by the state. There are around 5 million Muslims in France. They comprise the second largest religious group, and most of them have come from former French North Africa since the Algerian War of Independence. As in the case


of Britain, the United States, and Canada, Muslims became more visible in France in the 1980s, building mosques and opening halal butcher shops. These moves were noted in the mainstream community and media with apprehension, particularly when they were interpreted as expressing a burgeoning religious identification, rather than ethnicity. As Jocelyne Cesari points out, many French, including scholars, assumed that the movement of Muslims into public space signalled a “return to Islam.” In fact, it reflected the realization amongst Muslims that they would not return to Africa, and were now permanently domiciled in France.57 The community is concentrated in outer urban areas (the cités) and is largely segregated from European French. Unemployment is high in these neighborhoods, up to 60 percent, and only 4 percent of young people enter university.58 Muslims are barely represented in government or the civil service. In this context of economic insecurity and alienation from the social life of the majority, mainstream concern about ostensible public displays of Muslim signs and symbols has increased. These anxieties were strongest when it came to schools, which have in French history played a key role in the struggles of the state against the political influence of the Catholic Church. Throughout the twentieth century, French schools have been regarded as bastions of secularism.59 In the late 1980s, small numbers of Muslim girls began to wear the hijab to school. Teachers complained, but for some time the state left the decision about whether to permit this dress up to individual schools. In 1989, the Council of State actually declared that noncoercive and non-ostentatious forms of religious expression could not be banned from the public sphere. Then in the wake of September 11, 2001, Muslim consciousness increased in immigrant communities throughout Western countries, France included. In 2003, several incidents occurred in which Muslim schoolgirls refused to take off their headscarves. School authorities directed them to do so, arguing that the veils interfered with the secular nature of the schools, and the parties failed to reach an agreement. In response to the public outcry, President Chirac established a Commission on Secularism, chaired by his advisor Bernard Stasi, to consider and report on the issue. Chirac himself expressed the widely held oppositional position on veiling, on the grounds of gender equality: “We cannot allow people to shelter behind a deviant idea of religious liberty in order to defy the laws of the republic or to threaten fundamental principles of a modern society such as sex equality and the dignity of women.” Chirac described the veil as “a kind of aggression.”60 In the war of values that ensued, religious liberty was pitted against the rights of women. The Catholic Church weighed in against a possible ban on headscarves, on the grounds that it would interfere with free religious expression. An open letter addressed to President Chirac appeared in the


French fashion magazine Elle, signed by dozens of prominent French women, including Fadela Amara, founder of the movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives), a group with a strong following among French women of North African origin. The letter stated that “the Islamic veil sends us all, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, back to a situation of discrimination against women that is intolerable.”61 French feminists began a petition in support of banning the veil, claiming that schoolgirls wishing to wear it were subject to pressure from male family and community leaders, and were unable to make a free choice. On the other side of the debate, both Muslim and international human rights organizations declared that banning the veil would constitute an infringement of religious liberties.62 In December 2003, the Stasi Commission recommended that all overt religious symbols be banned from schools. (It further recommended that Jewish and Muslim holidays be added to the French calendar, in an obvious attempt to argue that they were treating all religions equally in the ban.)63 Legislation was passed in the French Parliament in March 2004 implementing the Stasi Commission recommendations on religious symbols in schools. Its recommendations on holidays, designed to create more parity between Christianity and other religions were, however, ignored. While some French Muslim feminists supported the ban, a large number angrily claimed that it was discriminatory. The French Muslim Women society announced that they would protest, and large-scale protests were held in early 2004. However, about 70 percent of the French population supported the ban, as did around 50 percent of French Muslims. Supporters of the legislation framed their opposition to veiling in several ways. The most important of these was the need to preserve laïcité and maintain the strictly secular character of public schools. But supporters consistently referred also to arguments for women’s freedom, claiming that family and community pressure to conform was behind the resurgence of the veil, and of other forms of social control of Muslim girls.64 Discussions of the veil are frequently accompanied by references to violence against young Muslim women for acting in “non-Islamic” ways. Arguing in The New Yorker for a connection between family pressure and wearing the veil, Jane Kramer cites the immolation of an unveiled young Muslim girl by a boy she has turned down.65 While laïcité and the protection of women’s rights figure as the chief arguments in favor of the ban, its supporters do at one level recognize the role played by the veil in expressing cultural identity. However, they refer not to the cultural identity of the women involved, but rather to that of organized groups of militant and fundamentalist Muslim men, who are assumed to be recruiting and pressuring women to veil.


The response to the veil in France is closely tied to attitudes toward Islamic fundamentalism. As we have seen, fear of militant Islam has risen in Western countries through the 1990s, and has both generated and reflected increasing Islamic identification amongst young Muslims. The veil is taken by many of its critics as the symbol for that identification, and for separatist militancy.66 Ironically, despite the avowed feminist position of many critics of the veil, they largely dismiss the identification of women themselves involved, and define the claims of identity made here as those of men. Particularly in the French case, the debate over the veil is notable for the absence or trivializing of the self-description and experience of the women involved. The media interviewed few young French women about their decision to wear the veil, and the Stasi Commission heard evidence from only two veiled women. In her sympathetic discussion of the ban, Kramer trivializes the experience of the young women involved by claiming that this issue cannot really be reduced to “scarves on schoolgirls.”67 Studies in other Western countries have shown that several quite different motivations inform girls’ decisions to wear the veil to school. Journalists reported clandestine conversations with girls in France who did indeed feel trapped into wearing it.68 However, several who were interviewed insisted that their decision was voluntary, and that it expressed a deep aspect of personal identity. In one highly publicized case, two teenaged girls, Lila and Alma Levy, daughters of a secular Jewish father and a secular Christian Algerian woman, converted to Islam and insisted on wearing their veils to school. They were expelled. Their parents were puzzled by the girls’ religious enthusiasm, but were supportive of their decision.69 The French League of Muslim Women, supporting the girls, asserted that young women would be more likely to stay at home than give up the veil, as it was part of their identity.70 In one study in which several girls wearing the veil were actually interviewed, Francoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar found that the veil functioned most often as a way of mediating between life in two distinct cultures, and as a sign of commitment and difference in a modern and materialist culture. The headscarf was an expression of identity, not “a rejection of French citizenship, but . . . a desire for integration without assimilation . . . an aspiration to be French and Muslim.”71 Similar conflicts have emerged in other countries, although France is the only European state to enforce a blanket ban. The tensions between moral argument and group identification can be seen in other cases, although in France, they are rendered more clearly by the absence of multiculturalism as a fundamental cultural and political value. In Britain, similar disputes over veiling have arisen, but no central government policy has been established. Mike O’Brien, the secretary of state for foreign affairs promised that Britain would not follow the French lead in passing legislation about the wearing of


religious symbols, because of Britain’s different history and approach to cultural diversity.72 In keeping with Britain’s gradual (and as yet incomplete) recognition of Muslims as an identity group, schools have dealt with the issue on a case-by-case basis, and in most cases they have reached settlements allowing girls to continue wearing the hijab. In one recent case, veiling was prohibited after negotiations broke down, but after the Commission for Equality Among Races condemned the decision, the school changed its position. The same school district then attempted to prevent a student attending school in the jilbab, a full-length dress—a decision eventually upheld, pending appeal by the High Court.73 Unlike in France, the veil is also commonly accepted as part of uniform for public employees. The British police force allows officers to wear headscarves, and British nurses can wear the veil. Feminist opposition to the veil, as in France, tends to link it to other systematic forms of oppression of women. Forced marriages for young Muslim girls have been particularly controversial in Britain from the 1990s. Some critiques have focused on the symbolism of the veil itself. In a controversial article, Polly Toynbee wrote revealingly: More moderate versions of the garb—the dull, uniform coat to the ground and the plain headscarf—have much the same effect, inspiring the lascivious thoughts they are designed to stifle. What is it about a woman that is so repellently sexual that she must diminish herself into drab uniformity while strolling down Oxford Street one step behind a husband who is kitted out in razor-sharp Armani and gold, pomaded hair and tight bum exposed to lustful eyes? (No letters please from British women who have taken the veil and claim it’s liberating. It is their right in a tolerant society to wear anything including rubber fetishes—but that has nothing to do with the systematic cultural oppression of women with no choice.)74

While Toynbee ends this paragraph with the claim that the issue here is freedom of choice, rather than the symbolic meaning of the veil, her first two sentences in this passage suggest that there is more to her opposition than choice, that in fact the choice of the veil, no matter how “free,” necessarily implies subordination. However the British feminist and liberal position has been much more divided than the French. British commentators have recognized a distinctively Muslim feminist viewpoint that aims at achieving economic and social equality for women within the context of Islamic commitment, and many newspaper articles feature interviews with successful young professional women who wear the veil—a very different perspective from that commonly found in France.75 In the Muslim women’s community itself, almost all public argument has opposed the French ban.76 After one British veiling dispute, the editor of Q-News, the magazine for


young British Muslims, wrote: “Contrary to the vain hopes of some educators, faith matters to an increasing number of British-born Muslims. They are reasserting their Muslim identity in the face of what is perceived as increased hostility to their faith identity.”77 One second-generation British Asian woman who wears the veil reported: “Wearing the veil makes me feel special, it’s a kind of badge of identity and a sign that my religion is important to me.”78 This articulated position in support of the veil and modernization combines with greater class mobility on the part of young British Muslims than their French counterparts.79 It is arguably this combination, as well as state support for cultural diversity, which has ensured that the issue of the veil is interpreted differently in Britain. Opponents have been unsuccessful in characterizing it as a moral issue, rather than one of community identification, because of the emergence of a class of socially and economically successful, and media-aware young Muslims, who support religious dress. Concerns about militancy amongst young Muslim men are high in Britain, as we have seen, particularly given recent social unrest in northern English cities, but these have not been effectively mobilized around the veil. In the absence of this, Muslim women’s arguments in favor of the veil have received more public attention, and have been interpreted as an identity claim similar to those made by ethnic groups in the context of British pluralism. There have been relatively few publicized incidents involving Muslim dress in schools in the United States. In March 2004, a 12-year-old girl was suspended from an Oklahoma elementary school for refusing to remove her veil. The case went to court, where Attorney General John Ashcroft filed an amicus curiae brief in her support, and the school eventually changed its dress code policy to accommodate the headscarf.80 Similar incidents have recently occurred in Tennessee and Louisiana, and so far, schools have eventually accommodated students in all cases.81 In 2004, however, a Florida woman refused to remove her niqab (which reveals only the eyes) for her driver’s licence photograph. The court later determined that, given the importance of driver’s licence photographs in establishing identity and controlling crime, it was not an unreasonable burden on the woman’s freedom of religious expression to require her to reveal her face for the photograph. As was the case in Britain, the numbers of Muslim women choosing to wear the veil increased in the United States in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, as part of a resurgence in Islamic identification amongst the young. A professor of Women’s Studies at Virginia, Farzaneh Milani, commented “It’s such a natural outcome of recent events. When you see your very identity attacked, you become more interested in it and more attached to it.”82 One recently veiled woman interviewed said “It’s


gotten to the point where I felt this is my culture and my heritage. This is something I have to represent.” Another said: “I wanted to show pride in being a Muslim. It gives me an identity and lets people know, here is this regular girl who does everything everyone else does, and is also a Muslim.”83 In the Sunni Muslim communities Garbi Schmidt studied in Chicago, the majority of Muslim women students embraced the hijab. In fact, Schmidt noted an increase in women choosing to veil over the period of her study, in the late 1990s. “Wearing the hijab marked not only gender, religion and community, but also specific public statements of their overall identity. It marked the individual’s choice to become ‘more’ than gender—the choice to be a specific model for gender and her faith”84 Community rituals praising those who had made the decision to wear the hijab, Schmidt argues, provide for a rebirth of the individual, and elevate them in status within the community. Muslims are the second largest religious community in Canada also, and public attention to the hijab has increased correspondingly with the size and visibility of the population. During the 1990s, several Quebec high school students were expelled for refusing to remove their headscarves. Public opinion had moved by 2003, when a Muslim girl was expelled from a Quebec private school for refusing to remove her scarf. The Quebec Human Rights Commission condemned the expulsion, but no legal action was taken against the school.85 After strong media criticism of a Muslim school in Quebec that required Muslim teachers and students to cover their hair, Patricia Kelly Spurles interviewed Muslim women teachers at the school. None found the rule objectionable, including those who did not wear hijab outside school. “Many felt the media’s interest in the school’s dress regulations was an attempt to vilify Muslims and their beliefs.”86 Pupils from the fourth grade upward were required to cover their hair. Spurles found no opposition to this amongst the students, nor any evidence that younger pupils were pressured to wear headscarves.87 Although the veil has attracted considerable negative attention in the Canadian media, the positions and views of Muslim women who choose to veil, particularly the young, have also been well reported and studied.88 (This accounts probably for a 2004 survey, which found that two out of three Canadians opposed a ban similar to that imposed by France, on the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols.89) In one study of veiling in Canada, Sajida Sultana Alvi, Homa Hoodfar, and Sheila McDonough interviewed a number of young Muslim women, largely from Pakistani and Somali backgrounds. They found no evidence that young women were being forced by their families to wear the veil. Many young women had in fact fought with their parents who were opposed to wearing it.90 Often in Canada (as in Britain) they are protesting the Indo-Pakistani culture of their


parents, which second-generation women find to be unIslamic. One woman commented: For me it has come to symbolize my identity as a Muslim woman whose faith and ideals are often fundamentally different than those she works and studies with. Setting oneself apart from the rest can be both challenging and quite useful. For example, confronting and encountering the perpetual stereotype of the timid and subservient Muslim woman can be exhausting, as we tire of the need to continually explain and justify our choices . . . . However, adopting a distinctive mode of dress can also be useful in alerting others to our distinctive beliefs and practices.91

While the majority of veiled women interviewed by Alvi, Hoodfar, and McDonough asserted that they wore it for religious reasons, many girls had taken up the veil after struggles with their parents over personal freedom, particularly restrictions on their ability to move around in public space, which had been imposed after puberty. Adopting the veil seemed to reassure their parents that they did identify as observant Muslim women, and were willing to make that identification public. Once veiled, they were given more freedom to go out, to interact with men, and to pursue their studies.92 Similar results were found by Carmen Cayer, in another study of first- and second-generation Indian and Pakistani Muslim women in Toronto.93 Some Muslim women also cited feminist reasons for adopting the veil, in response to criticism from Western feminists. The hijab also clearly provides a communal identification for girls. Veiled Muslim women in Toronto interviewed by Katherine Bullock described it as a symbol of “women’s Islamic identity.”94 The popularity of veiling in fact corresponds with an increasing trend since 1996 for young women at school and university to organize more Muslim social groups, and to involve themselves in community activities.95 This has increased further since the terrorist attacks of 2001, and the heightened visibility of Muslims. Alvi, Hoodfar, and McDonough also noted a rise in “selective veiling”: women choosing to veil not at all times, but only when they want to assert or reinforce their Arab or Muslim social identities.96 Conclusion As these interviews suggest, it is important not to underestimate the complexity and variety of reasons behind any individual Muslim woman’s decision to adopt the veil. Studies done in Canada, and much self-reported evidence in Britain and the United States make it clear that a significant number of Muslim women adopt a version of the hijab because they are moved by piety, strategic dealings with family, or the desire to identify


themselves as distinct from a society defined for them by materialism, the exploitation of women, and anomie. For these women, the decision to veil is experienced as a free and considered response to both their own sense of identity and their social environment. There is also evidence of cases where social and family pressure is exerted to coerce women into veiling, particularly in the case of Muslims in France. It is clear, however, that the simple argument made by many Western feminists that veiling symbolizes the oppression and subordination of women in Islam cannot be supported. To claim otherwise is to ignore the self-description of many women who choose to veil. What this suggests is that the veil itself has no singular cultural or moral meaning independent of the context in which it is worn.97 In Millian and post-Millian liberal terms, it is not veiling, but coercing women to veil, which is morally unacceptable. Where critics of the veil have recognized it as a mark of identification, they take that identification to be with militant separatist and fundamentalist Islam—an Islamic culture defined by its male spokesmen. In so doing, they assume a singular model of devout Muslim cultural identity, as defined and determined by men. Women who veil are taken as the passive bearers and symbolic representations of that particular culture. However, many women who veil describe their decisions to do so as active interventions in their cultural communities, actions designed to better shape their own independence, and to modernize their communities. Many in Britain, the United States, and Canada reject other forms of oppression of women common in Muslim communities—those very forms of oppression that opponents of the veil take it to symbolize. In this way, cultural communities are internally contested and redefined, as I described in chapter four. In Bhikhu Parekh’s words, for the young French girls who choose to wear the hijab, the decision was “a highly complex autonomous act intended both to remain within the tradition and to challenge it, to accept the cultural inequality and to create a space for equality. To see it merely as a symbol of their subordination, as many French feminists did, is to miss the subtle dialectic of cultural contestation.”98 As I have shown here, the popularity of veiling has corresponded with the emergence of a modern Muslim identity amongst younger Muslims in Western societies. The different Western reactions to the hijab I have noted reflect each country’s particular response to changes in Muslim identification in a broader sense. In the case of France, where multiculturalism has no state and popular support, and the fact of cultural pluralism is barely acknowledged, Muslim identification is interpreted primarily as the assertion of either irreconcilable moral positions or as a threat to social stability. In Britain, the United States, and Canada, where cultural diversity is regarded as a normal and positive social fact, claims by women that they veil


to express religious identity are more easily interpreted as an accepted and familiar form of social discourse. In these countries, the self-description and reporting of women who choose to veil constitute an important marker of the emergence of a distinct Muslim cultural community. As we have seen, multiculturalism in these countries developed in response to ethnic immigrant diversity, and ethnic plurality is understood to be fundamental. Only in the past two or three decades have Muslims emerged as a separate identity group, independent of ethnicity. This trend of self-identification on one hand, and prejudice against Muslims on the other, are, to a large extent, mutually reinforcing. Intolerance generates tighter community identification, while stronger Muslim communities and voices tend to produce further apprehension in the non-Muslim wider society. In this context, the defense of their decision to veil made by Muslim women provides a public statement of new cultural identity, internally contesting and challenging it at the moment of emergence.


C h ap t e r S e v e n Conclusion: Reconstructing Liberal Pluralism

It should be clear from the range of liberal responses to the problem of social diversity that, contrary to John Gray’s argument, liberalism does not retreat into a sterile legalism unresponsive to social realities.1 The liberal theorists from the nineteenth century to the present whose work I’ve discussed here have all been concerned in different ways with the relationship between individuals and their social environment. I have explored the various forms in which they have imagined this relationship, the ways in which their ideas have influenced each other, and some of the limitations and internal inconsistencies of their approaches. Pluralities have been cast in terms of interests, values, and (recently) nationalities, but as we have seen, liberals since Mill have failed to recognize that individuals are ascribed to and embedded in a complex range of social groupings that shape and determine not only their ideas and interests, but also their very sense of who they are in both the public and private worlds. It would be wrong to argue that pluralities of value and interest are not in themselves important social facts, but as we have seen, they are insufficient for understanding and responding to the political claims made by theorists of identity. The reasons for liberal theory’s shift away (since Mill) from the recognition of the social construction of identity can, as I have argued here, be explained by two currents in liberal thinking. One of these dates from the origins of liberal theory itself: possessive individualism (though I use the term here more broadly than C.B. Macpherson, who famously coined it in reference to classical liberalism and the possession of material property).2 The second, the hegemony of national identity, arises, as I showed in chapter two, during the nineteenth century. The Possessive Individualism of Pluralism I have argued here that the accusation often made against liberalism that it assumes individualism is unfounded. As Steven Lukes has pointed out,


individualism is a term used without much precision.3 Liberal theories do share a belief that the individual person is the basic moral unit of society, the good of whom forms the standard against which rules and principles must be judged. But contrary to critics’ claims, many liberals do not presume consequently either that individuals must be treated as if they were separate from the social world in which they live, or that the social world has only private, and not political significance. Nineteenth-century liberal theories of the person are permeated by attempts to theorize the balance between social construction and self-authorship. Mill’s distinction between individuality and individualism is an early version of this, which focuses critically on the abstraction of Enlightenment individualism. Through the nineteenth century, as I described in chapter two, liberals transformed Romantic individuality into an organic theory of community in which individuals were fated to express their individuality. Nevertheless, the figure of the abstract individual has been influential in the development of liberal thought, informing the two most important directions that specifically pluralist liberal thought has taken: moral pluralism, and interest pluralism in its various forms. For the political liberal theorist of moral pluralism, the individual is the existing possessor of particular beliefs, acquired prior to the political process in the private sphere. Moral beliefs derive from our constitutive attachments in the private sphere, but may be exchanged and altered in the public, like other possessions, and thus are separable from the individual holding them. The claims of identity politics challenge this distinction by demanding recognition in the public sphere of those constitutive attachments, or of the embedding contexts (as communitarians would put it) of the individual. As I have argued, political liberals like Moon are inconsistent in their own claims about the separation of identity from moral view, assuming as they do that shared national membership and commitment underpins and binds together a society with a plurality of moral views. Social science pluralism regards the individual as the possessor of interests, which may of course overlap with moral beliefs, and which are exercised and maximized in the public sphere. This paradigm is vulnerable to the same criticisms I made of moral pluralism: it artificially separates the constituted and embedded individual of the private sphere from the rational agent possessing and maximizing interests in the public. It produces, as Philip Green comments in a review of Dahl’s Democracy and Its Critics, an abstract pluralism.4 Although as I have shown, interest pluralists smuggle in an acknowledgment of social membership and embeddedness in their assumptions about shared national culture. For interest pluralist liberals, the possessive individual is fundamentally constituted by one social membership, nationality, which forms the shared framework holding otherwise atomistic individuals together.

reconstructing liberal pluralism / 137

The Hegemony of National Identity The reliance on shared national identity by liberal theorists as different as Moon and Dahl suggests that national membership has played a pivotal, though under-acknowledged role in the development of postclassical liberalism. I’ve argued here that the special status assigned to the nation has tended to lead liberal theorists to underestimate the political significance of other social sources of identity. John Stuart Mill recognized that character was shaped by both national membership and ascription to a range of social groups, relationally marked out and arrayed in a hierarchy of power. After Mill, however, emphasis is increasingly placed on the national community as the only source of constitutive and affective ties apart from the private world of the family (with which it was often paired). As the nation was increasingly distinguished from subnational groups, liberal debates over the role of nationalism became separated from concern about pluralism. Later liberals argued intermittently about how amenable nationalism was to liberal principles, as Kymlicka has described, but they did not see these debates as concerning pluralism. Moral pluralism remained a separate liberal concern, unrelated to social membership and ascription, as I have discussed earlier, and interest pluralism developed out of the late nineteenth-century separation between interests and identity. When recent multiculturalist liberals recovered the Millian (and postMillian) inheritance of a liberal accommodation of nationalism, they inherited at the same time the post-Millian separation between national and other forms of identity, and it is this, as I have argued, which has led to much of the criticism leveled at multiculturalist liberalism. Kymlicka’s assumption of the wholist nature of societal cultures rests upon the subordination of subnational cultural affiliations as interests or lifestyles. Tamir is unable to defend the special status she ascribes to national groups (while at the same time asserting that they should function as voluntary associations). As I have suggested here, arguments for minority national autonomy may still in fact be made—but not on the grounds of communal construction of the autonomous identities of members. Theorists who have exclusively focus on these groups point out rightly that they often have links to particular territories, unlike other identity groups. The concentration of a group in, and their effective control over territorial space offers an alternative and more defensible basis for national communities to claim autonomy. Of course, should they be granted it, their members will likely continue to have the same plural and cross-cutting affiliations as do those in any pluralist society. The bias toward national identity has led not only to exclusivist arguments for minority nation autonomy, but also to an overemphasis upon ethnicity in debates about cultural pluralism. I have shown how Muslim


immigrants have found it difficult to achieve political recognition as an identity group separate from their various ethnic origins. This case suggests, as I argued in chapter one in my study of identity politics, that the selfunderstandings of individual members of subnational groups are often underplayed by liberalism, and are mischaracterized as the expression of interest or choice. In fact, the case of Muslims, and particularly reactions to Muslim women wearing the veil, demonstrates the linkages between the bias to national identity and moral pluralism in liberalism. As we have seen, Muslims tend to be either refused classification as they are not an ethnic group, or if they are recognized, their claims are treated as moral arguments, rather than expressions of identity. And in the final twist, if they are recognized, it is only in the terms set by dominant men in the group. Social Membership and Self-Respect From the perspective of identity politics, it seems clear that returning to a Millian recognition of the complex social construction of identity would allow liberalism to incorporate the claims of identity groups for recognition, as long as these groups did not interfere with the autonomy of members. But from the perspective of liberal political theory, what is to be gained? There are several answers. To begin with, self-respect can only be guaranteed to members of a society that recognizes, as such, the social groups in large part responsible for individual development. Taylor makes this argument as we have seen, concluding that since group affiliation is a significant aspect of identity, groups must be recognized as at least presumptively contributing to individual self-respect. Joseph Raz argues similarly that discrimination on the grounds of religion, nationality, or race is illegitimate because it distorts people’s “ability to feel pride in membership of groups identification with which is an important element in their lives.”5 As I discussed in chapter one, Rawls argues that individuals require self-respect in order to function as free and equal citizens who can cooperate in a social project. Rawls believes that his principles of justice will ensure self-respect, because they will allow people a fair chance of carrying out their plans in life. Self-respect is necessary, he continues, not only in the public, but also in the private sphere because it enables people to develop their conceptions of the good. It seems clear, however, that self-respect is also damaged, as Taylor argues, by the misrecognition in public of social groups that constitute an important aspect of personal identity. Self-respect as a liberal value also requires that one’s views count for something in the process of political decision-making—that individuals, in the fullest sense of who they are, make the laws under which they live. Rawls’s basing of his principles of justice upon an overlapping consensus


reinforces the importance of taking into account different moral views— and, since moral views reflect private acculturation for Rawls, different social groupings. This kind of procedural fairness means that, as Bellamy summarizes: “acceptance of a just procedure depends not so much on agreement with the decision itself as on a sense of having had ones’s interests and values taken into account in the making of that decision.”6 I argued in chapter five that formal recognition of group identity and experience can form a crucial preliminary to the deliberative democratic process, when the parties to deliberation are members of historically marginalized groups. Further, group representation in decision making enables identity groups to express a communal perspective in decision making. As I have suggested, issues of accountability, and internal diversity within groups suggests that group representation is most effective at the local level, where there is a close connection between group spokespersons and group members. No political principle or arrangement can guarantee self-respect, which is a subjectively experienced state of mind dependent also upon personal temperament and circumstances. Some critics suggest that any link between group membership and self-respect is either so trivial or unprovable as to be irrelevant. Nancy Rosenblum, for instance, argues that only a willed act, and hence, active participation in groups confers self-respect, whereas identity groups offer only a passive process of identification. She is thus deeply skeptical of any role played by recognition of racial or cultural identity as promoting self-respect.7 Self-respect requires active participation in groups, reaffirming individual agency, rather than passive ascription. Because Rosenblum understands self-respect to be internally directed, and not necessarily damaged by social attitudes, she concludes that it must remain independent of public policy.8 Rosenblum identifies an important potential problem with identity politics for any liberal theory based on autonomy. I have more to say in what follows about the importance of active, rather than passive identification, and about membership in voluntary associations that arise out of identity groups. But it’s important to recall here that membership in identity groups, as I have described it, is socially ascribed, rather than voluntary or essential. It is, by definition therefore a public as well as a private matter, although individual response to it may be private and variable, and may include rejection of the ascribed identity. The political recognition of identity groups cannot guarantee self-respect because of this subjective and personal dimension, but for those who identify with their ascribed group, it can constitute a necessary requirement for self-respect. The interpretation of identity politics I have defended here does not see group membership as shaping the whole of individual identity, and in some cases personal factors will enable individuals to overcome demeaning attitudes toward their social


group (as Rosenblum maintains). But political theory should not rely on the particular virtues one might find in an individual character to compensate for the damage caused by public inequality. The personal aspects of identity do play a role, however, in mitigating any tendency for group membership to become totalizing, and self-respect to become self-glorification. This concern is raised by George Kateb, who argues that recognizing group identity is actually incompatible with self-respect. Kateb contends that group identification produces vices that are destructive to liberal individuality.9 We might sum up these vices as the development of an unrealistic and excessively positive sense of oneself that arises because of confusion between this self and the group. In Kateb’s view, group identification promotes “herd” behavior that effaces or suppresses personal distinctiveness, allowing the individual to be taken over by the group, and damaging his or her moral personality.10 This argument assumes that group membership is posited as both essential and determining. But once we concede that identity is importantly, but not entirely shaped by group membership, and that group affiliation is multiple and overlapping, Kateb’s warnings against the pitfalls of self-aggrandizement and self-mystification appear less relevant. Nor will the complete submersion of the individual into the group—more characteristic of totalizing systems like fascism—be likely. The personal sources of identity, and the multiplicity of group sources are likely to mitigate any such complete identification with a single group. Identity Politics and Autonomy One of the chief reasons for liberal antipathy toward identity politics, as I discussed in chapter one, is the concern that the latter incorporates a deterministic view of the subject: assuming each individual to be simply the unreflecting product of group membership. This conception of the person is incompatible with core liberal principles of autonomy, self-determination, and individual liberty. These concerns are in large part what drives Rosenblum’s critique of group identification. But the fact that group membership alone does not shape identity to the exclusion of personal factors, and the multiple nature of group affiliation, form a good defense to the autonomy critique, as they did to arguments from self-respect. As I argued in chapter one, a strong view of autonomy requires that individuals reflect upon their purposes from a position outside their experience—from a radically unconstructed, pre-social, and unique core. This definition of autonomy cannot be reconciled with the claims of identity politics as I have outlined them. But weak autonomy is compatible with group identification. As I argued in chapter one, weak autonomy does not require that


reflection on purposes take place from outside one’s experiences—only that some process of reflection does indeed take place. This could be from the perspective of other social experiences, or even from an internally critically position within that experience. This view of autonomy presumes that the purposes and goals that drive us are multiple, complex, and at times mutually contradictory. It is, in short, an inherently pluralist conception. Autonomy along these lines is not necessarily to be expressed in the single coherent life project sometimes assumed by liberals. From this perspective, autonomy is actually enabled within the context of multiple group membership. Because membership in different groups produces different aspects of an inherently complex identity, there must always be possible subject positions from which the individual can reflect upon and evaluate his or her socially constructed goals and purposes in an intrasubjective process. Moreover, as self-respect is necessary to autonomy, the public recognition of collective identities may be seen as essential to individual autonomy. The result here is antithetical to Rosenblum’s claim that according to identity politics, membership in a single culture determines the individual so thoroughly that self-distancing is impossible.11 Communities of Choice and Communities of Fate We have seen that liberal concerns about identity politics center around fears of determinism—fears that individuals might be assumed to identify with and support the aims of groups without freely being able to decide upon these. These concerns also call into question the relationship between voluntary and unchosen groups: communities of choice versus those of fate or ascription. A liberal theory of identity politics helps to clarify the relationship between these kinds of groups, and to point to important differences among interest groups. As I have shown, interest pluralists and associationalists concentrate entirely on voluntary associations, which they understand to be the true expressions of human personality, desires, and interests. While some, like Dahl separate interest clearly from “subculture,” Hirst, in his argument for the decentralization of political life and service provision to the level of the voluntary association, acknowledges the existence of cultural, or identity pluralism, but sees it as best expressed in voluntary group membership. Involuntary communities, such as those formed by ascription, have no place, he argues, in a truly pluralist system. They are created and sustained by force or popular pressure and attract none of the rights of communities of choice. Rosenblum makes a parallel argument from the perspective of the moral life of liberal democracy. She suggests that membership in a much wider


variety of voluntary groups than had previously been imagined promotes the virtues necessary to sustain democratic life. It does this by providing a variety of social contexts in which people develop their moral interests and learn to deal with each others.’ While identity groups, as we have seen, require only passive membership, voluntary associations require an active commitment that also in effect commits members to a pluralist civic life. I have argued here that Rosenblum’s critique of the negative effects of identification with social groups is mistaken. But concerns remain about the practical political implications of recognizing identity groups that do not have formal representative and governing structures. Who speaks on behalf of identity groups recognized in the public sphere? Many critics have pointed to the potential for manipulation here by self-appointed spokespersons for cultural groups who do not represent the views of other group members, or who represent, perhaps, one vocal and powerful section of a group.12 I have discussed some examples of this in chapter four, in the context of internal plurality within groups. To a large extent, the plurality of identity groups provides a defense here also: members of subgroups within identity groups can demand a voice of their own, if they feel that their concerns are not properly being expressed by group leadership. This reinforces my argument that the formal representation of identity groups is best done on a local level, so that internal diversity within groups can be fully represented, without the process becoming unwieldy. On the larger national level, proportional representation allows for crosscutting identities to be represented to the extent that they command popular affiliation. And a deliberative, rather than a representative approach to democracy will be more likely to ensure that minority voices within an identity groups are publicly heard. At a deeper level, the relationship between ascribed and voluntary communities in many cases depends on that between identity and interests. Recognition in the public sphere is essential so that interests can be determined and organized. Rosenblum and Hirst argue for recognition only for those voluntary associations that are often formed out of identity groups. These have a voluntary membership of those individuals in the group who are committed to organized representation and action. They are different from the group itself, and will inevitably have a more restricted membership than the identity group as a whole. But they are not entirely separate from the group, as associationalist theorists suggest, because they would not exist without the shared identity underlying interests. Associations like this embody the relationship between identity and interest, which has been so concealed in interest pluralism. They also demonstrate the artificiality of treating all interest groups as the same. Laski realized this when he tried, and failed, to argue the same significance for an association of season railway ticket holders, and economic classes.


Voluntary associations linked to identity groups play an important role in expressing identity because they allow individual members to deliberately and publicly identify themselves as bearers of their identities, as I argued in chapter one. The self-assertion of group members is crucial to a liberal theory of identity politics because it demonstrates autonomy. Engaging in second-order reflection upon goals means that group members must decide whether to accept or reject the shared values and meanings of the group. One way of achieving this is to choose whether or not to belong to a voluntary association of group members, and thus to pursue publicly the interests that arise out of collective identity. This is quite compatible with the notion that group membership is multiple and diverse. Individuals can become members of a range of associations, which express their shifting and crosscutting identity group membership. Notwithstanding her exclusion of identity groups, Rosenblum is correct to argue that the moral value of pluralism depends on the experience of pluralism by individuals through their shifting involvements.13 It’s important to note, though, that self-assertion does not require joining a voluntary association arising out of one’s identity group. All that must be fundamentally required for an individual to assert his or her group identity is the conscious decision to accept it—to identify with the group. In practice, this may be signaled through membership in activist organizations, but it may also simply be stated, or demonstrated through participation in community functions or activities. The debates over apology and testimony that I discussed in chapter five involve claims for political recognition made by many who identify as members of race groups, but who are not members of voluntary interest-based organizations linked to those groups. And of course, individual members of identity groups also demonstrate identification by seeking to redefine communal identity. I described in chapter one the ways in which members of ascribed communities have actively redefined their collective identities, transforming into positive and valued characteristics those negative and demeaning qualities that have been assigned to them as a group. Liberal Identity Politics and Social Justice Despite critics’ claims, liberal principles are not incompatible with the public recognition of identity groups and cultural communities. The social construction of identity as I have described it here, which incorporates complex construction from a range of social sources is not contrary to autonomy, nor reducible to determinism. The recognition of identity groups is rather necessary for the core liberal values of self-respect and autonomy. In chapter five I discussed some of the ways in which this recognition could be


formalized—particularly through the inclusion of identity groups in local policy and decision-making bodies. As we saw in the case of Muslims in chapter six, there are many potential opportunities for such groups to be included in policy- and decision-making, and to ensure that their cultural concerns are expressed through school curricula and public dress. Apology for historical injustice is another particular instance where the public recognition of identity groups ensures inclusion in the political process, and lays the groundwork for addressing current inequalities. It’s important to remember, when considering the policy implications of a revised liberal pluralism, that individuals are necessarily members of a range of social groups, all of which contribute to shaping identity. One way of recognizing politically this range of sources is to attempt to list, according to selected categorical principles, the possible identity groups that should be entitled to political recognition. This is essentially the strategy followed by Kymlicka and Tamir, and also underlies consociationalist theories. (While I have not discussed these specifically here, it should be clear that consociationalist approaches are inadequate to dealing with identity claims in modern pluralist democracies, because they address only national claims for recognition.) It is also the strategy underlying Hirst’s argument for devolving self-governance and service provision to the level of voluntary groups, which must be listed and fixed in order for people to choose between them. In the case of national groups, I have argued that special collective rights for national minorities cannot be defended on the liberal grounds that such groups uniquely shape the identities of individual members, and provide for their autonomy.14 Hirst’s requirement that individuals nominate a voluntary group to deliver services to them runs into the problem of forcing people to choose one group among others with which to identify for the purpose. From the perspective of liberal identity politics, attempts to list relevant identity groups across context should be treated with suspicion. Such lists depend upon “objective” criteria for determining which groups deserve recognition. In an early argument, for example, Iris Young identified a range of recognizable groups marked out by the criteria of oppression or discrimination.15 She later argued against separatism for oppressed or disadvantaged groups, because of the way in which this simplifies and freezes group identity against internal contestation.16 In her later work, Young drops identity as a criterion for group recognition, focusing instead on structural subordination, resulting from the position occupied by groups in social and economic structures.17 But from the liberal perspective I have defended here, the rights of groups to recognition (rather than redistribution) depend only upon the role they play in shaping the self-understanding and self-respect of group members, and not upon their role or function in


wider economic structures. Ascription and identification should be the only criteria for identifying groups entitled to recognition and deliberative inclusion in the political process. In practice, this means that groups not historically oppressed or marginalized, such as Christian fundamentalists, must be entitled to recognition. What about majority groups such as white males? For one thing, such groups are often not identified as such, but are instead assumed to be “normal.” And if they are identified, in most cases identity will be a moot point as they are already recognized by virtue of being the majority. But the liberal commitment to taking each identity claim on its own merits means that the demand to recognize and include groups usually associated with positions of structural power cannot be ruled out. The liberal identity politics perspective assumes that those groups entitled to recognition will change over time. As we have seen, Muslims in the West have only began to understand themselves as an identity group from the 1980s. Finally, which groups should be recognized will depend upon the issue under debate. Japanese Americans, for example, emerged as a clear group seeking public recognition in the form of an apology (and reparations) for historical mistreatment in the 1980s. It’s for this reason that I have argued that recognition and democratic inclusion should be issue specific, and local where possible. The perspective of liberal identity politics goes some way to revisioning the debate between proponents of recognition and redistribution, to which I referred at the beginning of this book. Critics have suggested that a political focus on recognition has meant that distributive inequalities—real injustices—have been overlooked. Nancy Fraser argues that the claims of class groups cannot be compared to those made on behalf of, say gender or ethnicity, because exploited classes aim not for recognition, but for abolition of the exploitation that brings them into existence in the first place—to “put the proletariat out of business as a group.”18 The liberal response along Millian lines, however, is that while classes exist and shape the identity of their members, they merit recognition in the public sphere. Recognition of identity groups, class included, is not the sum total of liberal political concerns, and redistributive policies should aim at a greater equalization of resources. But as long as (and to the extent that) class marks out a social identity, class groups should be recognized and included in the deliberative process. Of course classes tend not make the same identity claims in modern political discourse that they did during debates over the extension of the franchise in Mill’s time. But class-based claims continue to be relevant in the case of affirmative action policy. I discussed this case in chapter two as an example of policy designed to address existing group inequalities, which might become unnecessary once those inequalities disappear.


Some critics have further suggested that class or socioeconomic status, rather than race, should be the only criterion taken into account in hiring and admissions decisions.19 There have been strong liberal arguments made in response to this, to the effect that justice and fair equality of opportunity requires taking into account socioeconomic status as separate factor, but it cannot replace race.20 We can also make a separate and complementary liberal case, however, for taking into account both class and race, on the grounds of liberal identity politics. This case is based on the importance of identification for achieving one of the fundamental goals of affirmative action: increasing the participation of minorities in the professions and in high-status/high-visibility jobs. There has been particularly strong controversy, and several key legal decisions over the issue of entrance to professional schools, such as law and medicine. Affirmative action policies designed to increase the number of minorities in these fields have been designed not only to redress the past wrong of exclusion, but also to create more successful professional role models for young members of minority groups.21 Affirmative action is also designed to produce more professionals who may be willing to practice in minority communities, to serve the needs of the groups to which they belong.22 Those who argue that affirmative action should take into account economic status as well as race argue that the policy has in practice only benefitted middle-class minorities, leaving the poor as badly off and excluded as before.23 Not only do most who benefit from affirmative action in these cases come from economically privileged backgrounds, but the situation is self-perpetuating, as the “role model” argument continues to apply only in the middle class. Economically disadvantaged African Americans, for example, do not identify with those middle-class blacks who make claims, and seek advancement according to affirmative action. Race identity in this case divides along class lines. Simply replacing race with class on the grounds that economic inequality is the “true” injustice would not only fail to recognize the effects of racism at all socioeconomic levels, but would also fail to solve the problem of low representation of minorities in the professions. Considering both factors, however, would address social policy concerns over the training of professionals to serve minority communities. Minority professionals from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to function as role models, and possibly more likely to be willing to serve low-income minority neighborhoods. Similarly, whites from workingclass backgrounds do not only bring different cultural perspectives to universities and to student experience, as advocates of class-based programs argue, but also serve as role models for working-class whites. Recognizing class in this case means acknowledging internal divisions within minority communities, and the fact of shared identification.


A liberal identity politics is not an alternative to materialist redistributive policies designed to reduce inequality. Access to resources has of course an impact upon individual autonomy, but the recognition of identity is about something different although equally fundamental: individuals’ perceptions of themselves and their legitimacy in the public sphere. Mill defended greater worker self-management and profit sharing at the same time as he supported workers’ rights as a group to have representation in parliament. As I argued in chapter two, his ultimate aim was the reduction if not elimination of class differences, but in the realities of the then present, groups required self-representation. Similarly today, class groups may demand recognition at the same time as economic policies aim to reduce those wealth and income inequalities that reinforce class. This distinction between present recognition of difference and eventual elimination of barriers that may produce difference applies also to women. Anne Philips argues that women’s “culture” ought not be celebrated—or even recognized as such—because it is produced by oppressive structures that should be dismantled.24 But until such structures are removed, women’s self-identification in collective gendered terms must be recognized and represented. In any case, the requirements of social justice in democratic and pluralist societies are driven by existing social and political realities. They cannot, moreover, be categorized entirely in economic terms, as the cases of Muslims seeking recognition, and demands for apology for historical injustice remind us. While leftist critics have attacked identity politics for at best being divisive and irrelevant, and at worst, reflecting and reinforcing structural injustice, liberalism in the Millian tradition offers a perspective in which the group affiliations and commitments of individuals, and their own visions of themselves as complexly constructed, autonomous but embedded, are essential aspects of democratic politics.


Notes

Introduction 1. For a discussion of the emergence of new social groups, see Michael J. Piore, Beyond Individualism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 2. See e.g., Falling Down (1993, dir. Joel Schumacher, with Michael Douglas). 3. Rodney Barker, “A Future for Liberalism or a Liberal Future?” in The Liberal Political Tradition, ed. James Meadowcroft (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996), 181. 4. For a summary statement, see Gray’s review article “Autonomy is not the Only Good,” The Times Literary Supplement ( June 13, 1997), 30. This debate is well rehearsed in the issue of Social Research devoted to replies to Gray’s charge that Rawlsian liberalism “at no point touches the real dilemmas of liberal society.” Gray also responds to his critics. Social Research 61, 3 (Fall 1994). Amy Gutmann also refers to the need to write political philosophy for a less than ideal society in “Responding to Racial Injustice,” in K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 109. 5. This is also the theme of Glen Newey’s After Politics: The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Newey argues that contemporary political philosophers have been more concerned with formulating ideal prescriptions than with describing actual politics, as a result chiefly of their preoccupation with normative theorizing and applied ethics. 6. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). See also the collected essays in Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (London: Verso, 1992), and Mouffe, ed., The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993). 7. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Young differentiates between claims for recognition of group identity, and claims to remedy structural disadvantage in Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 102–7. 8. For a sympathetic discussion of postmodernism and political theory, see Stephen K. White, Political Theory and Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 9. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 45–6. 10. As Will Kymlicka has pointed out in his response to the separate line of attack taken by communitarians, this is to some extent a “straw person” version of

150 / notes

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

liberalism. Historically, in fact, liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill have always assumed that individuals are embedded in and shaped by the social context in which they live, and that a certain kind of identity is required for the formation of the liberal state. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 207–9. I discuss Kymlicka’s arguments in more detail in chapter 3. See e.g., Chandran Kukathas, “Are There Any Cultural Rights?” Political Theory 20 (1992): 105–39. Brian Barry, Culture and Equality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). Nancy Fraser addresses the relationship between redistribution and recognition from a different perspective in “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” in Cynthia Willett, ed., Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 19–49. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. Donald Moon, Constructing Community: Moral Pluralism and Tragic Conflicts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Rawls, Political Liberalism, 303. It is at this point that the “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson calls the modern nation, arises. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), ch. 3. What is also significant in its emergence is that people from different classes, increasingly educated and literate, are able to read the same newspapers and popular literature, and thus to imagine the same community. For the classic statement, see Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). Dahl restates and clarifies his views in Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Liberalism, Community and Culture; Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4–6. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 120. Miller argues that “the principle of nationality supports equal citizenship rather than a form of politics that is fragmented along group lines.” See On Nationality, 153. But his charge that identity politics leads to social fragmentation is unsupported by evidence. Moreover, he oscillates between seeing nationalism as a deep source of identity on the one hand, and formal common citizenship on the other. For example, Melissa Williams, whose work I discuss in chapter 5, admits the difficulty in doing this—and does not pursue it. See Williams, Voice, Trust and

notes / 151 Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 220.

Chapter One

Identity Politics and the Limits of Moral Pluralism

1. Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 30. 2. Paul Hirst distinguishes these “communities of fate” from voluntary associations in Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 49–56. I discuss Hirst’s work in detail in chapter 3. I should note here that “fate” in the sense I am using it refers to the fate of ascription—and nothing either more metaphysical or natural. Further, it is not always impossible to leave communities of fate: people can sometimes move between classes, occasionally “pass” as members of another race or ethnic group, conceal a religious identity and even change sex. But exit is not a simple matter of deciding no longer to belong, as it is from voluntary associations. 3. Gutmann, Identity in Democracy, 13. 4. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 44. Young provides an extended definition of the concept of a social group, on which I draw, at 42–5. There does exist nevertheless a closer relationship between social group and associational membership than theorists of each, such as Young and Hirst, admit. I explore the importance of this for liberalism in my conclusion. 5. K. Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 30–105. 6. Ian Hacking discusses the process by which types of individuals or groups are brought into existence by our naming of them, which he terms “dynamic nominalism,” in “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222–36. 7. For an exploration of this see: The Making of the Modern Homosexual, ed. Kenneth Plummer (London: Hutchinson, 1981). 8. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 43. 9. Two important examples in a large body of work are: Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon, 1989) and Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 10. I borrow this term from Appiah, who distinguishes it from race as a biological category. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 32. 11. W.E.B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography Of a Race Concept (Milwood: Kraus-Thomson, 1975), 116–17, cited in Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 75. 12. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

152 / notes 13. Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 72. 14. Susan Wolf, “Comment,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 76. 15. See John C. Turner et al., Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 16. K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Gutmann, 160. 17. Hacking, “Making Up People,” 230. 18. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 78. 19. See e.g., Will Kymlicka: a culture “provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres.” Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 76. Gutmann cites this to support her own distinction between cultural and ascriptive groups in Identity in Democracy, 216, fn. 36. 20. Ibid., 90. The example Appiah gives of cultural geneticism (of which he is critical) is that of a black man who knows nothing about jazz, and yet “owns” it in a way that a white jazzman cannot. 21. See my discussion of Kymlicka in chapter 3. 22. Shane Phelan, “All the Comforts of Home: The Genealogy of Community,” in Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Christine Di Stefano (Boulder: Westview, 1996), 244. 23. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 95–6. 24. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993). 25. Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 32 and chapter 3 in general. 26. Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival,” 151. 27. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Gutmann, 25. 28. Ibid., 39. 29. See Zillah Eisenstein’s discussion of the implications of engendering bodies in The Female Body and the Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 79–91. There is also a discussion of specific group needs in: Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 30. As Gutmann concludes, there may be reasons for granting autonomy and selfgovernment to minority national groups, but this cannot be justified on the false assumption that the group provides an all-encompassing cultural identity for its members. Gutmann, Identity in Democracy, 53. 31. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983). 32. Phillips, Democracy and Difference (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 139. 33. As Charles Larmore points out, moral pluralism may be understood either philosophically or sociologically. In the philosophical sense, assumed by Isaiah Berlin, human ideals are not all compatible, and the fulfillment of some will

notes / 153

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

make others impossible. Both theory and ordinary experience force us to recognize a plurality of values, and to accept that there exists no single set of unified moral truths, nor any “final harmony in which all riddles are solved, all contradictions reconciled.” Because there can be no single correct answer to questions of competing values, Berlin argues that government cannot be justified in prescribing or supporting any one conception of the good. It must instead allow people the “negative freedom” to pursue whichever ends they choose. In the sociological sense, reasonable individuals will inevitably disagree about conceptions of the good, whether or not any unified hierarchy of moral values exists in a philosophical sense. For the purposes of my argument, it is not necessary to decide between these. Whether or not moral pluralism exists ultimately in a philosophical sense, as Larmore points out, most liberal pluralists assume the sociological definition, which ties moral plurality to actually existing social groups. See Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 152–74; Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 167–72. See also, “The Pursuit of the Ideal” and “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” in Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Knopf, 1991), 20–48. For a detailed discussion of the types and sources of moral pluralism that does not, however, venture much on its implications for liberal political theory, see Steven Lukes, “Making Sense of Moral Conflict,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Rosenblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 127–42. This term is Rawls’s: Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). I use it here to refer generally to liberals who argue from moral pluralism. I borrow these terms from Anne Phillips, who points out that the politics of ideas has proved inadequate to dealing with problems of minority group exclusion. Phillips argues that excluded groups must be brought themselves into political debate. See Anne Phillips, “Dealing with Difference: A Politics of Ideas or a Politics of Presence?” Constellations 1, 1 (1994): 74–91. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, 27. See Michael Walzer, “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” Political Theory 18, 1 (February 1990): 6–23. See e.g., Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1984). A crude form of this position is popular amongst conservative opponents of multicultural education. For an instance of its influence on liberal thinkers, see Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1992). Charles Taylor remarks that it is only by clarifying ontological issues that the debate between liberals and communitarians can be seen as “the complex, many-leveled affair that it really is.” See Charles Taylor, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 182. The suggestion that the liberal–communitarian debate ignores sociological analysis was made to me by Isaac Kramnick. It is echoed in another context by Nancy Rosenblum, who remarks that if communitarianism is to provide the “strong dose of sociological realism” that liberal theory lacks, it cannot afford to

154 / notes

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

ignore pluralism. See Nancy L. Rosenblum, “Pluralism and Self-Defense,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Rosenblum, 208. See Introduction, note 4. As Kymlicka points out in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 226. This is also the view elaborated by Ronald Dworkin in his article often taken to be definitional of modern liberalism: “Liberalism,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 127. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 398. William Galston refers to the political liberalisms I examine here as “freestanding monist” approaches to political theory. See Galston, Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political—Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1988): 223–51. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971). Rawls, Political Liberalism, xvi. Ibid., xvi, 36, 37. Rawls first discusses this in “Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (February 1987): 1–25. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 40. Ibid., xviii. This shift suggests a prima facie answer to Gray’s criticism, if not, the latter maintains, a satisfactory one. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 68, 270. Susan Okin draws attention to this inconsistency in her review of Political Liberalism in American Political Science Review 87, 4 (December 1993): 1011. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 37. See e.g., Okin’s review of Political Liberalism, at 1011. See John Gray’s critical review of Political Liberalism: “Can We Agree to Disagree?” The New York Times Book Review Sunday, May 16, 1993. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 181. Ibid., 318–19. J. Donald Moon, Constructing Community: Moral Pluralism and Tragic Conflicts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Ibid., 23. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 26–8. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 45. Ibid. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 46.

notes / 155 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 10–11, 63. Ibid., 66. In fact, citizen identity is often articulated through shared membership in other groups, expressed in “hyphenated” forms of identity. Charles E. Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 42–8, 50–5. Larmore distinguishes between moral pluralism and reasonable disagreement in “Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement,” in Cultural Pluralism and Moral Knowledge, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61–79. Ibid., 53–4. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 64–5. See e.g.: Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Post Modernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 1992); Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Gutmann. Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity, 106. Ibid., 126. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 55. Galston seems to suggest that the fact that there exist internal dissent within cultural groups and mixing between cultures means that cultural communities have no political significance beyond the moral positions they produce. Richard E. Flathman, The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 173–4. Stanley Benn argues that we attribute value to autonomy because of our capacity to be autarchic, or to have agency—the minimal capacity for human choice. Autonomy represents thus the ideal human state possible, given agency. See Stanley Benn, “Freedom, Autonomy and the Concept of the Person,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1975–1976): 109–30. Loren Lomasky describes agents as “project pursuers” in Persons, Rights and the Moral Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Rawls, Theory of Justice, 93. Flathman, Philosophy and Politics of Freedom, 174. David Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory: A Critique and Reconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 23. Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 20. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 408. Johnston, Idea of a Liberal Theory, 26. Raz, Morality of Freedom, 133. Ibid., 372. Nancy Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). David Johnston draws an interesting connection between the project-pursuing characteristics of agents and industry as Hobbes and Locke use the term to denote the capacity to formulate complex plans and the actions required to carry them out. We might conclude that if project- pursuing is part of

156 / notes

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110.

111. 112. 113.

114. 115.

self-creation, as Romanticism understands autonomy, then the anti-industrial Romantic ideal owes more than it acknowledges to the culture of industrialization. See Johnston, Idea of a Liberal Theory, 83, fn. 26. Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, 44. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 57–9. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 62–3. See e.g.: Amy Gutmann, “Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, 3 (Summer 1985), 319. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 63. Walzer, “Communitarian Critique,” 21. This form of reflection and evaluation would not be strong enough for some liberals. I am not arguing, as John Gray does, that what is involved here is a distancing of the autonomous agent from her social environment and the influence of others. See John Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 74. Dworkin, Theory and Practice of Autonomy, 17. If the members of a group autonomously develop aims and goals that are continually thwarted by prejudice and economic powerlessness, they may over time give up developing such purposes (become the victims of cultural despair) and lose even this aspect of their autonomy. Joshua Cohen, “Moral Pluralism and Political Consensus,” in The Idea of Democracy, ed. David Copp, Jean Hampton, and John E. Roemer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 274. See e.g., Fay Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), conclusion. See e.g., Peter Jones, “Respecting Beliefs and Rebuking Rushdie,” in Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration, ed. John Horton (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 114–38. Charles Taylor also invokes the Rushdie case in “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, 62. Tariq Modood, “Muslims, Incitement to Hatred and the Law,” in Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration, ed. Horton, 139. Ibid., 152.

Chapter Two Class, Nation, and Character in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought 1. See Isaiah Berlin’s essays: “Two Concepts of Liberty” and “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life,” in Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–72 and 173–206. Some critics have claimed that Mill in fact asserted a paternalistic moralism, in which liberty was less important than, and less instrumental in, the achievement of social progress and reform. For a recent statement, see Joseph Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). I do no more than note these arguments here, as my own are centered not on the ultimate value of liberty for Mill, but on his views concerning the relationship between group membership and moral belief.

notes / 157 2. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 208–9. 3. Shirley Robin Letwin, The Pursuit of Certainty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 252. See also Graeme Duncan, who refers to Mill’s liberal politics as “democratic—or even bourgeois democratic—Platonism,” because of the emphasis he gives to the guiding role of the intellectual elite. Graeme Duncan, Marx and Mill: Two Views of Social Conflict and Social Harmony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 259. 4. Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 43–4. 5. Contrary to Parekh’s assertion (see my note 4 earlier), Mill does not assume that the social structure provides equal opportunities for success for different characters and ways of life. His arguments for the representation of women and the working classes explicitly refer to the importance of securing political and economic power for these groups. 6. Gerald Gaus argues that the liberalisms articulated by Locke and James Mill “share a vision of men as essentially independent, private and competitive beings who see civil association mainly as a framework for the pursuit of their own interests.” See Gaus, The Modern Liberal Theory of Man (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 7. 7. Janice Carlisle discusses the relationship between Mill’s construction of his own character and his analysis of the influences upon character development in John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991). 8. Stefan Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 35 (1983), 33. 9. Anthony Appiah distinguishes these as the collective and personal dimensions of identity, in “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 151. 10. Ibid., 31. 11. In “On Liberty,” e.g., Mill asserts that only people sharing in a specific national character—that of advanced Western societies—are fit to enjoy the liberties ensured by democratic government. See J.S. Mill, “On Liberty,” in On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 13–14. 12. Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character,’ ” 36. 13. C.B. Macpherson makes this argument in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 32. For a more sympathetic discussion, see Nancy L. Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), especially 15–16. 14. Wendy Donner discusses the Aristotelian aspects of Mill’s thought on character. See W. Donner, The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 120–1. 15. Richard Bellamy, “Introduction,” in Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice, ed. Richard Bellamy (London: Routledge, 1990), 9. See also Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 170–2.

158 / notes 16. Richard Ashcraft, “Class Conflict and Constitutionalism in J.S. Mill’s Thought,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 107. As Ashcraft argues in a later essay, Mill’s criticism of Bentham here forms part of his more general reorientation of political theory to reflect social structures and the distribution of power within society. See Richard Ashcraft, “John Stuart Mill and the Theoretical Foundations of Democratic Socialism,” in Mill and the Moral Character of Liberalism, ed. Eldon J. Eisenach (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 171. 17. See John Stuart Mill, “Bentham,” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 volumes, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–1991), vol. X, 77–115. 18. John Stuart Mill, “The Subjection of Women,” in On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Collini, 139. 19. Mill, “Bentham,” 90–1. 20. John Stuart Mill, “A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive,” in Collected Works, VIII, 869. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 904. 23. Mill, “A System of Logic,” 868. 24. Georgios Varouxakis discusses the importance for Mill of comparisons between France and England in Mill on Nationality (London: Routledge, 2002), ch. 4. 25. Varouxakis surveys recent competing and contradictory interpretations of Mill’s attitude toward nationalism in Mill on Nationality, 5–7. 26. John Stuart Mill, “Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848,” in Collected Works, XX, 347; “Considerations on Representative Government,” 549–50. 27. John Stuart Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” in Collected Works, XIX, 547. 28. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” ch. II, 383–98. 29. Georgios Varouxakis discusses these two aspects of the relationship between national character and political institutions in “National Character in John Stuart Mill’s Thought,” History of European Ideas, 24, 6 (1998): 376. 30. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 549. 31. Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 32. Ibid.,149, 191. Mehta argues that this failure stems in part from the tendency of Victorian liberals (whom he compares unfavorably to Burke and Rousseau) to overemphasize national markers such as shared language and religion, and to discount the importance of shared territory. Such an emphasis is consistent with my argument here that nationality is crucial for Mill because of the way in which it shaped individual identity. 33. John Stuart Mill, “Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848,” Collected Works, XX, 348. 34. Mill, “On Liberty,” 13–14; “Considerations on Representative Government,” ch. IV, 413–21. 35. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, 209. 36. As C.B. Macpherson has pointed out, the existence of a working-class dependent solely on the sale of their labor underpinned Bentham’s prescribed

notes / 159

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

economic system. Moreover, Bentham assumed differences between categories of people, such as the different sensibilities of the sexes and social classes. But he made no attempt formally to incorporate group membership into his system of ethics or political representation. See C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 28, 30. John Stuart Mill, “The Claims of Labour,” in Collected Works, IV, 369. Macpherson, Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, 49. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 441–7. Ashcraft, “Mill and the Theoretical Foundations of Democratic Socialism,” 179. J.W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 106. Ashcraft, “Class Conflict and Constitutionalism,” 111. Mill, “Bentham,” 90. Ibid., 109. Mill, “On Liberty,” 10. In his early work (such as “The Reorganization of the Reform Party”) Mill was most concerned with opposition between the rising middle classes and the aristocracy. Later his attention shifted to relations between the middle- and the (most numerous) working classes. On this, see Duncan, Marx and Mill, 219. Mill, “The Subjection of Women,” 38. John Stuart Mill, “Principles of Political Economy,” Collected Works, III, 819–20. As Duncan comments of “The Reorganization of the Reform Party”: “It is the moral quality imputed to the radicals which takes the breath away. . . .” Duncan, Marx and Mill, 223. Mill, “Principles of Political Economy,” Collected Works, II, 367; III, 763, 770. Mill, “The Claims of Labour,” 380. John Stuart Mill, “De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [II],” Collected Works, XVIII, 181. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform,” Collected Works, XIX. Mill, “The Subjection of Women,” 169. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 404. Ibid., 405. Mill’s views on the necessity for representation of minorities are discussed by Bruce Baum in “Freedom, Power and Public Opinion: J.S. Mill on the Public Sphere,” History of Political Thought, XXII, 3 (Autumn 2001), 508–10. Janice Carlisle, “Mr. J. Stuart Mill, M.P., and the Character of the Working Classes,” in Mill and the Moral Character of Liberalism, ed. Eldon J. Eisenach, (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 143–67. John Stuart Mill, speech to the House of Commons on The Representation of the People bill, Collected Works, XXVIII, 61. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 467–8. Mill, “On Liberty,” 57. Mill, on The Representation of the People bill, 65. John Stuart Mill, “Chapters on Socialism,” Collected Works, V, 707. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 446. Mill, “On Liberty,” 10. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” ch. VII.

160 / notes 66. Mill, “The Reorganization of the Reform Party,” Collected Works, VI, 469. 67. Donner, The Liberal Self, 120–1. 68. The dominance of this Romantic conception in later liberal thought is clear from Rawls’s reference to it in the form of a “plan of life.” Rawls derives the term from the American Idealist Josiah Royce, who was himself a disciple of T.H. Green. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971), 408. 69. Mill, “On Liberty,” 57. 70. Ibid., 58–9. 71. John Stuart Mill, “Autobiography,” in A. Ryan, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 93. Alan Ryan discusses the failures of Mill’s attempt thus to reconcile free will and determinism in John Stuart Mill (New York: Pantheon, 1970) and in “Mill’s Political Thought,” in A Cultivated Mind: Essays on J.S. Mill Presented to John M. Robson, ed. John M. Robson and Michael Laine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 135. 72. Mill, “A System of Logic,” 840–1. 73. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” 459. 74. For an extended discussion of the importance of Mill’s socialism, see Ashcraft, “Class Conflict and Constitutionalism,” 114–16. 75. Gaus, The Modern Liberal Theory of Man, 120. 76. See Martin Pugh, State and Society: A Social and Political History of Britain, 1870–1997, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 3. 77. This is well discussed by Ian Bradley in I. Bradley, The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 82–4. Many (emerging) liberals earlier in the century had supported Greek independence, although not all; Fred Rosen argues that an “authoritarian” (or paternalistic) strand of liberal thinking developed in India was in fact opposed to Greek self-determination. See Fred Rosen, Bentham, Byron and Greece (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 149–51. 78. Ibid., 83. 79. Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 20–1. 80. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 39. 81. T.H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics (Oxford: Kraus, 1969), 218. 82. Ibid., 219. 83. Ibid., 232. 84. For Green, of course, liberty also meant freedom from irrational desires—thus opening the gates to more extensive social legislation designed to “liberate” the working classes from their selfish animal or “lower” desires. Green’s conception of individual liberty and the role of choice is famously distinguished from Mill’s by Berlin in “Two Concepts of Liberty.” 85. The concept of a gradually extending community of fellows dates to Tocqueville, who, as David Boucher has pointed out, argues that civility is at first practiced amongst people recognized as being of one’s own kind, but is then extended as excluded classes are incorporated into one’s moral community. Boucher discusses the significance of this idea in the work of R.G. Collingwood and in contemporary communitarian thinking in “Tocqueville, Collingwood,

notes / 161

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108.

History and Extending the Moral Community,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2, 3 (2000) 326–51. T.H. Green, “Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation,” in Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings, ed. Paul Harris and John Morrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 97. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 251. Ibid., 288. Green, “Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation,” 181. Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 29. T.H. Green, “Lectures on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,” in Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, ed. Harris and Morrow, 195–6. L.T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1918), 29–30. L.T. Hobhouse, “Liberalism,” in Liberalism and Other Writings, ed. James Meadowcroft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 64. Ibid., 77. L.T. Hobhouse, “Sociology,” in Sociology and Philosophy: A Centenary Collection of Essays and Articles, intr. Morris Ginsberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 39. Ibid., 40. Elsewhere, Hobhouse examines the role of voluntary associations and argues that liberal principles may also be enjoined to protect individuals against associations that act oppressively toward their members. See Hobhouse, “Liberalism,” 18. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State, 85. Ibid. L.T. Hobhouse, Social Development (London: Allen and Unwin, 1924), 154–5. Hobhouse points out that class relations in fact cut across state borders. Ibid., 103. This inconsistency in Hobhouse’s views is discussed by Gaus in Modern Liberal Theory of Man, 92–3. Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 97. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 128. Vincent and Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship, 65. Ibid., 66. For discussions of the attitudes of later nineteenth-century liberals toward the women’s suffrage movement, see Martin Pugh, “Liberals and Women’s Suffrage, 1867–1914,” in Citizenship and Community, ed. Eugenio Biagini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45–65, and Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 138. John Morrow argues that Bosanquet regarded class identity as serving the larger social whole. Collective solidarity amongst the working class promoted social identification, and was a desirable end in spite of its possible implications

162 / notes

109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116.

for liberal conceptions of property rights under capitalism. See John Morrow, “Community, Class and Bosanquet’s ‘New State,’ ” History of Political Thought, XXI, 3 (Autumn 2000): 495. Vincent and Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship, 121–2. Christopher Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), xi–xii; Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy 1860–86 (London: Allen Lane, 1976), 11–15. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 167–72. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 398. See e.g. K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Gutmann, 156–63. Iris Marion Young addresses this issue in Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 81–120. See also Melissa Williams, Voice, Trust, and Memory; Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 119. It should also be noted that affirmative action is defended as a temporary measure, which will be unnecessary once historical injustices have adequately been compensated for. At that point, supporters of the policy argue, minorities will be represented in universities and the workplace in proportion to their numbers. Similarly, Mill believed that group representation would eventually become unnecessary once human progress had integrated and equalized the relations between social groups.

Chapter Three Interest Pluralisms and the Erasure of Social Identity 1. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 335; David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), 251–63. 2. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 3. Ibid., 42–4. 4. See e.g.: Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Macmillan, 1962), ch. 6. 5. Hirschman, Passions and Interests, 38–9, 54. 6. Ibid., 48. 7. Interest is not entirely subsumed by class for Mill; people also share certain interests irrespective of their social and economic status. Thus, utility is justified as the arbiter of ethical questions as long as it is “grounded in the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.” John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 14. 8. This suggests that the persistence of the underlying liberal concept of the person as infinite consumer, despite what Macpherson has called the developmental democracy phase of the nineteenth century, might be due not only to the liberal commitment to capitalist economic relations, as Macpherson suggests, but also to the simultaneous development of the idea of class

notes / 163

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

interest. This latter idea was paradoxically, of course, part of the liberal critique of unrestrained capitalism. See C.B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 32–3. Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). Michael Freeden discusses the permeation by liberal ideas of the thought of Laski and Cole in chapter 8 of Liberalism Divided (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Harold J. Laski, A Grammar of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), 22. Harold J. Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 275. Laski, Grammar of Politics, 31. Harold J. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), 19. While in his early writings Laski saw the state as simply one association among many, he came in his later work to recognize it as a uniquely compulsory organization that assumes the special role of moderating the activities of associations to ensure equality between citizens. In Grammar of Politics, although still an organization of individual wills, the state has become the “fundamental instrument of society” or “the source of ultimate reference.” See Laski, Grammar of Politics, 39, 34. The task of the state is to coordinate functions, to balance competing interests, and to satisfy the common needs of men and women as citizens. Laski, Grammar of Politics, 247. Rosenblum discusses the Romantic “penumbra of privacy” in Another Liberalism, at 65–6. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 256. Harold J. Laski, The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays (London: Allen and Unwin, 1921), 67–8. Ibid., 139–40. In The Foundations of Sovereignty, Laski argues for the real corporate personality of the group—that it has a “mind” of its own, distinct from its members. In later work, notably the Grammar, he moves away from this. See Bernard Zylstra, From Pluralism to Collectivism (Assen: van Gorcum, 1968), 54. Ibid., 54. Laski, Authority in the Modern State, 26. Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, 68. Laski, A Grammar of Politics, 18–19. Laski, like Mill, suggests that the cultivation of reason can allow persons to escape the determinism of social class, adding to the above that: “careful examination” allows the individual rationally to shape his will against that of the institution. Harold J. Laski, The State in Theory and Practice (New York: Viking Press, 1935), 95. Ibid. G.D.H. Cole, “Conflicting Social Obligations,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, xv (1914–1915), 144. Ibid., 145. Ibid.

164 / notes 30. Henry Mayer Magid, English Political Pluralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 35. 31. G.D.H. Cole, Social Theory (New York: Stokes, 1920), 189. 32. Ibid., 1. 33. Ibid., 26. 34. Ibid., 25–6. 35. G.D.H. Cole, Labour in the Commonwealth (London: Swarthmore Press, 1918), 57. 36. G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Restated (London: Leonard Parsons, 1920), 25. 37. Cole, Social Theory, 26. 38. Ibid., 37. 39. Ibid, 7. 40. Ibid., 34. 41. Ibid, 78. 42. Cole, Labour in the Commonwealth, 42. 43. Ibid., 46. 44. Cole, Social Theory, 2. 45. Ibid, 26. 46. Hirst, Associative Democracy, 2. 47. Paul Q. Hirst (ed.), The Pluralist Theory of the State (London: Routledge, 1989), 40–1. 48. F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 35. 49. Ibid., 214. 50. John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 106. Gunnell discusses at length the enthusiastic reception of English pluralism in American political theory circles during the 1920s. 51. Ibid., 133. 52. The most important texts were: David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951), and Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). 53. Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 233. 54. Ibid., 252. 55. Ibid., 254. 56. Ibid., 255. 57. Ibid. 58. Hirst, Associative Democracy, 24. 59. Ibid., 11. 60. Ibid, 29–30. 61. Ibid., 13. 62. Ibid., 13–14. 63. Ibid., 14. 64. Ibid., 33. 65. Ibid., 45. 66. Ibid., 51. As I have already noted, Hirst’s communities of fate are what I refer to as ascriptive communities. This latter terms emphasizes the constructed, rather than essential nature of these groups—although as I discuss later, Hirst also regards his fated communities as artificial constructs.

notes / 165 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Ibid., 54. Ibid., 53. Hirst, Associative Democracy, 54. Ibid. Hirst’s claim that nonvoluntary community membership is not constitutive of identity is easily dismissed on the level of history as well as theory. See e.g., Primo Levi’s description of the effects of incarceration in Auschwitz—the quintessential nonvoluntary community—upon individual moral character in Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Collier Books, 1993). 72. Marilyn Friedman makes a similar distinction between communities of choice and those she terms “communities of place,” into which persons are born. She also describes the complex interrelationship between the two forms of membership, and concludes that while chosen communities help to define individuals, most people are probably ineradicably constituted by their membership in communities of place. See Marilyn Friedman, “Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community,” in Communitarianism and Individualism, ed. Shlomo Avineri and Avner De-Shalit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 118. 73. See e.g., Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1992).

Chapter Four Multicultural Liberalism 1. See e.g., Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 2. Discussed at length in Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 3. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 207–8; Multicultural Citizenship, 52–3. 4. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 82–4. 5. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, 164. 6. Kymlicka emphasizes the importance of culture to freedom in Multicultural Citizenship, ch. 5. 7. Ibid., 89. This argument is also made by Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz, “National Self-Determination,” Journal of Philosophy 87, 9 (September 1990): 447–9. 8. Michael Walzer, “Comment,” in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 100–1. 9. Will Kymlicka, “Ethnic Associations and Democratic Citizenship,” Freedom of Association, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 180–1. 10. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 18. 11. Ibid., 19. 12. Ibid., 18. 13. Ibid., 76. 14. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, 168. 15. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 17–20. 16. Ibid., 19.

166 / notes 17. Thomas W. Pogge, “Group Rights and Ethnicity,” in Ethnicity and Group Rights (NOMOS XXXIX) ed. Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 187–221. 18. Pogge, “Group Rights and Ethnicity,” 198. 19. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 20. The freedom to leave exclusive religious groups in which a child has been raised is an issue the courts have failed to address in cases concerning parental rights. See Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 and Quiner v. Quiner 59 Cal. Rptr.503, both of which are discussed by Kent Greenawalt in “Freedom of Association and Religious Association,” in Freedom of Association, ed. Gutmann, 109–44. 21. Pogge, “Group Rights and Ethnicity,” 198–200. 22. In his unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–1791), cited in Raymond Williams, Keywords Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 89. 23. See E.P. Thompson, “The Patricians and the Plebs,” in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993), 16–96. 24. Gareth Stedman Jones, “Working Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1990: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,” in Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 182–3. 25. For a thoughtful discussion of the role of language in cultural definition, in a particular case, see Audra Simpson, “Paths Toward a Mohawk Nation; Narratives of Citizenship and Nationhood in Kahnawake,” in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 132–4. 26. Brian Walker, “Modernity and Cultural Vulnerability: Should Ethnicity be Privileged?” in Theorizing Nationalism, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 149–50. 27. This is in fact often the view that dominant groups take of minorities. As Andrew Hacker writes: “In the eyes of white Americans, being black encapsulates your identity. No other racial or national origin is seen as having so pervasive an effect on personality or character.” Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile and Unequal (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 32. 28. These identity intersections are discussed in: Kimberle Crenshaw, “Whose Story is It Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill” and Christine Stansell, “White Feminists and Black Realities: The Politics of Authenticity,” both in Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 402–40, 251–68. 29. Michael Walzer, “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” Political Theory 18, 1 (February 1990): 6–23. 30. This form of reflection and evaluation would not be sufficient for autonomy according to some liberals. I am not arguing, as John Gray does e.g., that what is involved here is a distancing of the autonomous agent from her social environment and the influences of others. See John Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 74. 31. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Concept of Race,” in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (Milwood: Kraus-Thomson, 1975) and Sandra Harding’s useful discussion of feminist standpoint theory in Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 119–34.

notes / 167 32. I must note here that Kymlicka’s following characterization of Quebecois culture as traditional, conservative, and dominated by the Church, and the Quiet Revolution as its sudden and dramatic entry into modernity is in fact debatable. Pierre Trudeau has famously defended this interpretation of French Canadian history in “The New Betrayal of the Intellectuals” (in Federalism and French Canadian Society [Montreal: HMH, 1967]). Claude Couture argues that this characterization of Quebecois history is the product of colonial attitudes amongst anglophone social scientists. He suggests that pre–Quiet Revolution Quebec was not culturally or ideologically monolithic, but rather diverse, and subject to the same influences of urbanization and industrialization as anglophone Canada. See Claude Couture, Paddling With the Current: Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Etienne Parent, Liberalism and Nationalism in Canada (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1998), chs. 1 and 2. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for Palgrave for drawing this to my attention. 33. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 87. 34. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, “The Hidden Politics of Cultural Identification,” Political Theory 22, 1 (February 1994): 153–65. 35. Ibid., 158. 36. See e.g., the introduction to The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14. 37. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, ch. 8. 38. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, 197. 39. Ibid., 149. 40. It is in fact the imposition of traditional Western liberal models that in some cases has led to that patriarchal rule. See James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 193. 41. Cohen, Howard, and Nussbaum, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? See also Chandran Kukathas, “Are There Any Cultural Rights?” Political Theory 20, 1 (February 1992): 105–39; and “Cultural Rights Again,” Political Theory 20, 4 (November 1992): 674–80. 42. See end note 41. 43. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism chs. 1 and 2. 44. Ibid., 33. 45. Ibid, 36–7. 46. Yael Tamir, “Siding with the Underdogs,” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? ed. Cohen, Howard, and Nussbaum, 47–52. 47. Kymlicka, “Rights of Minority Cultures,” 143. 48. Bernard Yack, “Reconciling Liberalism and Nationalism,” Political Theory (February 1995): 174. 49. Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, 7. 50. Ibid., 95–102. 51. Yael Tamir, “The Enigma of Nationalism,” World Politics 47 (April 1995): 432. 52. As James Clifford argues in “Identity in Mashpee,” The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 277–346. 53. Will Kymlicka, “Misunderstanding Nationalism,” Dissent (Winter 1995): 135. 54. Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, 149–50. 55. Ibid., 25. 56. Ibid., 71.

168 / notes 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

77. 78.

Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, 73. Ibid., 96–9. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 102. Ibid. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 60–1. Ibid., 32–5, fn. 9 and 10. Taylor bases his theory of dialogical identity formation on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. See also the useful discussion in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 189–92. But his claims are also supported by object relations theory, the psychological theory of personality development that holds that the infant human psyche is constructed through relations with others (particularly of course the mother). For a basic statement see D.W. Winnicott, “Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development,” in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 111–18. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 32. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 38. Taylor’s contention here is similar to that of Margalit and Halbertal, who argue for the right to cultural survival on the grounds that their particular communal cultural identity forms a crucial part of the self-conception of individuals. See note 7 earlier. Ibid., 60–1. See Taylor’s discussion of Kymlicka in “The Politics of Recognition,” 40–1, fn. 16. Ibid., 25, 27. See e.g., Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Kymlicka, “Misunderstanding Nationalism,” 137. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 133. Kymlicka, “Misunderstanding Nationalism,” 137. Gerda Lerner made an early argument for this kind of recovery in The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Margalit and Raz directly address this problem when they acknowledge that their description of groups entitled to self-determination would apply as equally to social classes, which “clearly do not have a right to self-determination.” Margalit and Raz, “National Self-determination,” 448. For discussions of these issues, see Simpson, “Paths Toward a Mohawk Nation”; Manuhuia Barcham, “(De)Constructing the Politics of Indigeneity,” in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Ivison, Patton, and Sanders, 137–51; John Bern and Susan Dodds, “On the Plurality of Interests: Aboriginal Self-government and Land Rights,” in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Ivison, Patton and Sanders, 163–79. A system currently operating in New Zealand, where specific seats are set aside for Maori voters only. See e.g., Lani Gunier, “The Representation of Minority Interests,” in Classifying By Race, ed. Paul E. Peterson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 21–49.

notes / 169

Chapter Five Group Representation and Deliberative Liberalism 1. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19–20. 2. For a critique of the paradigm (to which I will later return) see Lynn M. Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” Political Theory 25, 3 ( June 1997): 347–76. 3. For example, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), 1–5. 4. Iris Young terms this previously dominant paradigm the “aggregative model.” See Inclusion and Democracy, 19–21. 5. For an influential early assessment from a theoretical perspective, see Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). See also the essays in J.R. Pennock and J.W. Chapman, eds., Participation in Politics (NOMOS XVI) (New York, 1975). 6. See chapter 1 earlier, note 35. 7. These criticisms are detailed by Nancy Rosenblum in Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 319–39. See also K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Gutmann, 149–63. 8. John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1. 9. Robert Gooding-Williams defends deliberation in a multicultural society along these lines in “Race, Multiculturalism and Democracy,” Constellations 5, 1 (1998): 30–4. 10. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 81–120. 11. See e.g., Ian Shapiro “Enough of Deliberation: Politics is about Interests and Power” and Iris Marion Young, “Justice, Inclusion and Deliberative Democracy,” both in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 28–38, 151–8. 12. In an early statement, Joshua Cohen argued that deliberative outcomes should be settled only by reference to the reasons offered by participants. See Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 23. For an argument that reasons need to be acceptable to a hypothetical third party, see Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 13. Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 14. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 2–3. 15. Ibid., 95–101. 16. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 37–40. See also Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” 347–76. 17. Young argues for “communicative,” rather than “deliberative” democracy, on the grounds that the former allows more latitude in the forms of speech recognized. Communicating ideas becomes crucial, rather than arguing them. See Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Changing Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 122–5.

170 / notes 18. Young, “Communication and the Other,” 124. 19. Ibid., 122–5. 20. Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference, 82–3. 21. Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” 370–3. 22. See e.g., the case of Senator Carol Moseley Braun’s response to the Senate’s consideration of the renewal of a patent on the Confederate flag insignia, routinely granted to the Daughters of the Confederacy. Braun launched an emotional and impassioned appeal against the patent, in which she testified to African Americans’ self-understanding of their identity in terms of the legacy of slavery. Reported in “Ms. Moseley Braun’s Majestic Moment,” New York Times July 24, 1993, 18. 23. In the late 1980s, the United States apologized to (and compensated) Japanese Americans who had been interned during the Second World War. Over the next decade (and this is not an exhaustive list) the Roman Catholic Church apologized for its failure to prevent the deportation and murder of French Jews during the Holocaust. British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for Britain’s mistreatment of the Irish during the potato famine. The Canadian government apologized for its mistreatment of indigenous peoples, and the British Crown apologized for its failure to fulfil treaty obligations owed to the Maori people of New Zealand. 24. Plato, “The Apology” in Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W.H.D. Rouse (New York: Mentor, 1956), 423. 25. Frow, “A Politics of Stolen Time,” Meanjin, 57, 2 (1998): 362–3. 26. In 1997, Democratic House member Tony Hall proposed a bill for the federal government to apologize for slavery. 27. This practice has arguably amounted to attempted genocide. See Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: Commonwealth of Australia, 1997). 28. For a useful discussion see Mitchell F. Rice and Martin Carcasson, “The Promise and Failure of President Clinton’s Race Initiative of 1997–1998: A Rhetorical Perspective,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2, 2 (1999): 249–50. 29. In the Australian case, see the letter from Senator Herron, the minister for aboriginal affairs, to Father Frank Brennan, cited in Robert Manne, “In Denial, the Stolen Generations and the Right,” Australian Quarterly Essay 1 (2001): 75. In the American case, see “Clinton Opposes Slavery Apology,” US News and World Report, April 6, 1998, 7. A parliamentary resolution was eventually passed in Australia in 1999, expressing regret for past injustices. It was a vague statement, however, which did not refer to specific practices. 30. See this chapter, fn. 27. 31. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 58. 32. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 137. 33. This is a frequent charge made by opponents of apology and reparations. See e.g., Armstrong Williams, “Presumed Victims,” in Should America Pay? ed. Raymond Winbush (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 165–71. 34. See e.g., Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Politics and Forgiveness,” in Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict, ed. Nigel Biggar (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001), 44.

notes / 171 35. Nancy Fraser discusses the role of weak or “counter” publics in Justice Interreptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 72–7. 36. Melissa S. Williams, Voice, Trust and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 37. Ibid.,57–82. 38. Ibid., 70–5. 39. Ibid., 13. 40. There are currently seven Maori seats. See “New Zealand’s Electoral System: The Maori Electoral Option,” New Zealand Electoral Commission at http://www.elections.org.nz/esyst/mroll.html. 41. See David Liddle, “Djerrkura Wants Black Seats in Parliament,” Land Rights Queensland March 1998. 42. Williams, Voice, Trust and Memory, 209–10. 43. See e.g., Lani Gunier, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1994) and Douglas J. Amy, Real Choices/New Voices: The Case for Proportional Representation Elections in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 44. Phillips, The Politics of Presence, 80. 45. In her discussion of intersectionality, Kimberle Crenshaw suggests an excellent example of the way in which the groups that should be consulted in determining policy toward an issue area emerge out of the facts of the issue itself. In a study of social policies dealing with domestic violence, Crenshaw demonstrates that policies concerning the provision of services and funds to victims have been set by white, middle-class women in government and social authorities. They are, however, ineffective in addressing the problems of poor, minority women who are victims of domestic violence. Bringing in women with different class and race intersecting identities to help determine how shelters are run and funds are spent will result in more effective policy solutions. See Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color,” in The Public Nature of Private Violence ed. Martha Albertson Fineman and Rixanne Mykitiuk (New York: Routledge, 1994), 93–118. 46. From The Equal Opportunity Act, 1964. Cited in Pedro A. Noguera, “Transforming Urban Schools by Increasing Community Control,” In Motion Magazine, May 20, 1999. 47. James Jennings, “The Politics of Black Empowerment in Urban America: Reflections on Race, Class and Community,” in Dilemmas of Activism: Class, Community and the Politics of Local Mobilization, ed. Joseph S. King and Prudence S. Posner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 128. The movement for community control of schools suffered a major setback when conflict between parents and teachers over governance at a school in the Oceanhill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn led to a city-wide strike by the United Federation of Teachers in 1968. 48. Gregory Streich discusses the role of these “mediating groups” in public discussions about race in “Constructing Multiracial Democracy: To Deliberate or Not to Deliberate,” Constellations 9, 1 (March 2002): 127–53.

172 / notes 49. Peter Finn, Citizen Review of Police: Approaches and Implementation (US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, 2001). 50. Richard J. Terrill, “Civilian Oversight of the Police Complaints Process in the United States: Concerns, Developments and More Concerns,” in Complaints against the Police: The Trend to External Review, ed. Andrew J. Goldsmith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 51. Finn, Citizen Review of Police: Approaches and Implementation, 85. 52. Cathy J. Cohen, “Straight Gay Politics: The Limits of an Ethnic Model of Inclusion,” in Ethnicity and Group Rights, ed. Shapiro and Kymlicka, 575; Donald B. Rosenthal, “Regime Change and Gay and Lesbian Politics in Four New York Cities,” in Culture Wars and Local Politics, ed. Elaine B. Sharp (Lawrence, KA: University of Kansas Press, 1999), 66. 53. John Zeh, “Council OKs Police Review Board but . . . ,” Rainbow Cincinnati, January 26, 1999. 54. These events are summarized by Dan Horn in “Civility Turned to Anarchy: How It Happened,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 16, 2001. 55. “Thomas’ Death Seen as Catalyst for Change,” staff report, Cincinnati Post, April 16, 2001. 56. “Race Panel Leadership Takes Shape,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 18, 2001. 57. For a comprehensive mission statement and list of activities, see http:// www.cincinnatican.org/About/index.htm. 58. Richelle Thompson, “First We Talk: Community Meetings Produce Results,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 7, 2002. 59. In this way, groups act as both weak publics formulating opinion on racerelated issues, and as strong publics in driving policy formation. See Streich, “Multiracial Democracy,” 139–40. 60. See e.g., Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” 362–9. 61. See note 52 earlier.

Chapter Six Cultural Recognition and the Claims of Muslim Immigrant Communities 1. Probably because of the assumption that religious belief is a fundamental aspect of personal identity, Muslims in the West have generally not been characterized simply as interest groups. 2. For an excellent survey of the development of relations between Muslim immigrants and Western host countries see Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3. Jane I. Smith, Introduction to Muslims in the West, 6. 4. Tariq Modood, “Muslims and the Politics of Difference,” in The Politics of Migration: Managing Opportunity, Conflict and Change, ed. Sarah Spencer (Oxford: Blackwell for Political Quarterly Publishing, 2003), 102–3. 5. Ibid., 103. 6. Ibid., 104. 7. Jorgen S. Nielsen, Muslims in Western Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). The Honeyford affair in this period, in which racist

notes / 173

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

accusations about minorities were made publicly by the white headmaster of a school in Bradford, with a large proportion of South Asian and Muslim students, helped reinforce a newly emerging political consciousness amongst Muslims. David Herbert, “Islam, Identity and Globalization: Reflections in the Wake of 11 September 2001,” in Religion, Identity and Change: Perspectives on Global Transformations, ed. Simon Coleman and Peter Collins (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 156. As established in Mandla v. Dowell Lee, [1983] 2 AC, 548. See Bob Hepple and Tufyal Choudhury, “Tackling Religious Discrimination: Practical Implications for Policy Makers and Legislators,” Home Office Research Study 221 (Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, February 2001), 20. See National Statistics, UK, at:http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget. asp?id⫽ 293. Iftikhar H. Malik, Islam and Modernity: Muslims in Europe and the United States (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 66. Steven Vertovec, “Islamophobia and Muslim Recognition in Britain,” in Muslims in the West, ed. Haddad, 29. Herbert, “Islam, Identity and Globalization,” 156. See e.g., “War on Terrorism or Muslims,” The Muslim News Online, Friday 28, September 2001, at http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/paper/index.php?article⫽409. Vikram Dodd, “Muslims Face More Suspicion,” The Guardian Tuesday, November 5, 2002. At: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukresponse/story/ 0,11017,830107,00.html. Bobby Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (London: Zed, 1997), 16. Herbert, “Islam, Identity and Globalization,” 159. Guardian/ICM poll, reported in Paul Kelso and Jeevan Vasagar, “Muslims Reject Image of Separate Society,” The Guardian, Monday, June 17, 2002. The same surveys showed that while older Muslims thought their community should be more closely integrated into British society, the younger generation tended to think there was already enough or too much integration. Pnina Werbner, “Public Spaces, Political Voices: Gender, Feminism and Aspects of British Muslim Participation in the Public Sphere,” in Political Participation and Identities of Muslims in Non-Muslim States, ed. W. Shadid and P. van Koningsveld (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1996), 68. Karen Leonard, “South Asian Leadership of American Muslims,” in Muslims in the West, ed. Haddad, 233. Aminah Beverly McCloud, African American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995). Mohamed Nimer, “Muslims in American Public Life,” in Muslims in the West, ed. Haddad, 169. Leonard, “South Asian Leadership of American Muslims,” 234. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, “Muslims in U.S. Politics: Recognized and Integrated, or Seduced and Abandoned?” SAIS Review XXI, 2 (Summer–Fall 2001): 93.

174 / notes 26. Dale E. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 27. Garbi Schmidt, “The Complexity of Belonging: Sunni Muslim Immigrants in Chicago,” in Muslim Minorities in the West: Visible and Invisible, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane I. Smith (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2002), 48–9, 114. 28. Leonard, “South Asian Leadership of American Muslims,” 241. 29. Though the transition from ethnicity to religion as the fundamental marker of identity appears to be slower in the United States than in Britain. Garbi Schmidt concludes that ethnic affiliation is still the strongest argument against a unified Muslim American community. See Garbi Schmidt, Islam in Urban America: Sunni Muslims in Chicago (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 191. 30. Nathan Glazer, “The Emergence of an American Ethnic Pattern,” in From Different Shores: Perspsectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, ed. Ronald Takaki (New York, Oxford University Press, 1994), 11–23. 31. Leonard, “South Asian Leadership of American Muslims,” 234. 32. Nimer, “Muslims in American Public Life,” 172–4. 33. Kathleen Moore, “The Politics of Transfiguration: Constitutive Aspects of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998,” in Muslim Minorities in the West, ed. Haddad and Smith, 34. 34. Agha Saeed, “The American Muslim Paradox,” in Muslim Minorities in the West: Visible and Invisible, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane I. Smith (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2002), 48–9. 35. Saeed, “The American Muslim Paradox,” 53. 36. Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49. 37. Schmidt, Islam in Urban America, 8. 38. See e.g., “ ‘Islam is Peace’ Says President,” White House press release, September 17, 2001, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/ 20010917-11.html. 39. Gary Gerstle, “Pluralism and the War on Terror,” Dissent (Spring 2003): 34. See e.g., “(Re)embracing Diversity in NYC Schools,” part of Columbia University’s Muslim Communities in New York City Project, reported at: http://www.sipa. columbia.edu/muslim-nyc/education/reembracing_diversity.html. 40. Malik, Islam and Modernity, 179. 41. Karim H. Karim, “Crescent Dawn in the Great White North: Muslim Participation in the Canadian Public Sphere,” in Muslims in the West, ed. Haddad, 262. 42. Daood Hassan Hamdani, “Canada’s Muslims: An Unnoticed Part of Our History,” address on the occasion of Eid-al-Adha to the Canadian Parliament, Ottawa, May 2, 1996. At: http://muslim-canada.org/cdnmuslm.htm. 43. Karim, “Crescent Dawn in the Great White North,” 268. 44. The term veil is commonly used in the West to denote any headcovering worn by Muslim women, from the full Afghani burqa to a simple headscarf. As I discuss later, in many cases these head coverings reflect local, cultural, or national, rather than religious practices. The Arab word hijab refers to covering or modesty, and is often used generically, to refer to all headcoverings worn for religious

notes / 175

45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

purposes. Niqab is the term for face-covering, and jilbab for a loose robe that covers clothes. I note that veiling is a controversial word to use in the context of these discussions, because of the way in which it has been eroticized in Western discussions of Muslim women. See Katherine Bullock, “Challenging Media Representations of the Veil: Contemporary Muslim Women’s Re-Veiling Movement,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 17, 3 (2001): 22–53. See e.g., Susan Moller Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Okin in fact refers only briefly to the veil, concentrating on what she sees as more serious forms of cultural and social oppression of women, justified by multiculturalism. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), ch. 8. See Muslim Women in the United Kingdom and Beyond, ed. Haifaa Jawad and Tansin Benn (Leiden: Brill, 2003), xiv. Nancy Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty: Towards a Feminist Theory of Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 171. When, e.g., the Bush administration went public to justify its attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan, First Lady Laura Bush spoke publicly about the cruelties and oppression enforced upon women by the Taliban, and their need to cast off their veils. See Irene Donohoue Clyne, “Muslim Women: Some Western Fictions,” in Muslim Women in the United Kingdom and Beyond, Experiences and Images, ed. Haifaa Jawad and Tansin Benn (Leiden: Brill, 2003,) 28–30. Bullock, “Challenging Media Representations of the Veil,” 42. For a particularly strong example of media criticism of the wearing of hijab in Canada, see Michele Lemon, “Understanding does not Always Lead to Tolerance,” Facts and Arguments, Globe and Mail, Tuesday, January 31, 1995. In fact, popular and media feminist criticism of the veil has been much stronger than that of feminist academics. Okin (see note 46 earlier) has little to say about the veil except that it is far less important an issue to Muslim women immigrants than polygamous marriage. There is an extensive discussion in: Anne Sofie Roald, Women in Islam: The Western Experience (London: Routledge, 2001), ch. 12. The status of hijab in the hadiths is discussed by L. Clarke in “Hijab According to the Hadith: Text and Interpretation,” in The Muslim Veil in North America, ed. Alvi, Hoodfar, and McDonough (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2003), 214–86. Clarke concludes that both conservatives and liberals on the subject of women’s dress can produce plausible exegeses of the hadiths to support their positions. See e.g., Homa Hoodfar, “More Than Clothing: Veiling as an Adaptive Strategy,” in The Muslim Veil in North America, ed. Alvi, Hoodfar, and McDonough, 17–18. Singapore has taken similar action. See the detailed discussion in: Jeremy Jennings, “Citizenship, Republicanism and Multculturalism in Contemporary France,” British Journal of Political Science 30 (2000): 575–98.

176 / notes 57. Jocelyne Cesari, “Islam in France: The Shaping of a Religious Minority,” in Muslims in the West, From Sojourners to Citizens, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37. 58. Jane Kramer, “Taking the Veil: How Frances’s Public Schools Became the Battleground in a Culture War,” The New Yorker, November 22, 2004, 66. 59. In the French case, debate has centered around the threat allegedly posed by scarves to laïcité—the concept of separation of church and state in France. 60. “Chirac Calls Muslim Veils ‘Aggressive’ in Schools,” Reuters, December 6, 2003. 61. Elle France, Monday, December 8, 2003. Reported in Elaine Sciolino, “French Panel Recommends Banning Headscarves in Schools,” The New York Times, December 11, 2003. 62. See “Chirac’s Hijab Remark Antagonizes French Muslims,” Islam Online, December 7, 2003. At: http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2003-04/ 22/article02.shtml. Also the International Helsinki Foundation statement at: http://www.ihf-hr.org/viewbinary/viewhtml.php?doc_id⫽5259. 63. There has been considerable confusion about the French law, which states that it applies only to “religious” forms of dress, and specifically exempts, e.g., Sikh turbans, claiming that these are “ethnic” and not “religious.” This created an uproar. 64. Nelly Olin, a member of the Stasi Commission, claimed (without evidence) that one-third of girls wearing the hijab in schools are forced to do so. Le Monde, July 3, 2003. 65. Kramer, “Taking the Veil,” 66–7. 66. See the interview with Saida Kada, a prominent defender of the veil, in “Daughters of France, Daughters of Allah,” by Marie Brenner, Vanity Fair, April 2004. 67. Kramer, “Taking the Veil,” 63. 68. See Brenner, “Daughters of France.” 69. Hugh Schofield, “Jewish Dad Backs Headscarf Daughters,” BBC News, Wednesday, October 1, 2003. At: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/ 3149588.stm. 70. Kimberly Conniff Taber, “Isolation Awaits French Girls in Headscarves,” Women’s e-News, March 5, 2004. At: http://www.womense-news.org/article. cfm/dyn/aid/1738/context/archive. 71. Francoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Le Foulard et la Republique (Paris: La Decouverte, 1995), 204. 72. See “Banning of Headscarves is an Attack on Fundamental Freedoms Says FCO Minister,” Islamic Foundation Press Release, February 6, 2004. At http://www.mcb.org.uk/OBrien0204.pdf. 73. “Luton School Lifts Headscarf Ban,” The Guardian, March 4, 2004. 74. Polly Toynbee, “Behind the Burka,” The Guardian, September 28, 2001. 75. See e.g., Katharine Viner, “Feminism as Imperialism,” The Guardian, Saturday, September 21, 2002. 76. Natasha Walter, “When the Veil Means Freedom,” The Guardian, Tuesday, January 20, 2004. 77. Fareena Alam, “British Press Unite in Hysteria over Jilbab,” Times Educational Supplement, June 25, 2004.

notes / 177 78. In “Women and the Veil: Personal Responses to Global Process,” by Helen Watson, in Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity, ed. Akbar S. Ahmed and Hastings Donnan (London: Routledge, 1994), 151. 79. See Malik, Islam and Modernity, 87–8. 80. “Muslim Girl in Oklahoma Public School O’Kd to Wear Headscarf,” Dallas Morning News, November 12, 2004. 81. See “School Alters Dress Code after Muslim Student Complains,” Associated Press, January 21, 2005. Also: “Suit Continues over Headscarf Incident in LA School,” Associated Press, February 1, 2005. 82. Emily Wax, “The Fabric of Their Faith,” Washington Post, May 19, 2002, C01. 83. Ibid. 84. Schmidt, Islam in Urban America, 106. 85. Reported in the United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (Department of State) International Religious Freedom Report 2004—Canada. Available at: http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2004/ 35529.htm. 86. Patricia Kelly Spurles, “Coding Dress: Gender and the Articulation of Identity in a Canadian Muslim School,” in The Muslim Veil in North America: Issues and Debates, ed. Alvi, Hoodfar, and McDonough 56. 87. Ibid., 58–9. 88. See e.g., Naheed Mustafa, “My Body is My Own Business,” The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, June 29, 1993, A26. 89. Centre for Research and Information on Canada survey, July 2004. Reported at http://www.cric.ca/pdf_re/new_canada_redux/new_canada_ redux_summary. 90. Alvi, Hoodfar, and McDonough, eds., The Muslim Veil in North America, 15. 91. Statement of Mihad Fahmy, in Sheila McDonough, “Voices of Muslim Women,” in The Muslim Veil in North America, ed. Alvi, Hoodfar and McDonough, 106. 92. See the narratives in Homa Hoodfar, “More Than Clothing: Veiling as an Adaptive Strategy,” in The Muslim Veil in North America, ed. Alvi, Hoodfar and McDonough, 3–40. 93. Carmen G. Cayer, “Hijab, Narrative and the Production of Gender among Second Generation, Indo-Pakistani, Muslim Women in Greater Toronto” (MA thesis, Social Anthropology, York University, 1996), 184, cited in: Bullock, “Challenging Media Representations of the Veil,” 35. 94. Katherine Bullock, “The Hijab Experience of Canadian Muslim Women,” Islamic Horizons, March/April 1998. 95. Hoodfar, “More Than Clothing,” 29. 96. Ibid., 32. 97. In a similar argument about the status of the veil as a symbol of subordination, Nancy Hirschmann concludes that the veil itself is not oppressive, but rather “its deployment as a cultural symbol and practice may provide (and often had done so) a form and mode by which patriarchy oppresses women in specific contexts.” See Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty, 171. 98. Bhikhu Parekh, “A Varied Moral World,” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? ed. Cohen, Howard, and Nussbaum, 73.

178 / notes

Chapter Seven Conclusion: Reconstructing Liberal Pluralism 1. See Introduction in this book, p. 1. 2. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). 3. Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), ix. 4. Philip Green, “Review Essay on Robert Dahl’s Democracy and Its Critics,” in Social Theory and Practice 16, 2 (Summer 1990): 227–8. Green notes in this that “race” appears nowhere in the index to Dahl’s book, and he seems equally oblivious to political claims associated with gender. 5. Joseph Raz, Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 254. 6. Richard Bellamy, “Pluralism, Liberal Constitutionalism and Democracy: A Critique of John Rawls’s (meta)Political Liberalism,” in The Liberal Political Tradition ed. James Meadowcroft (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996), 85. 7. Nancy L. Rosenblum, Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 61. 8. Ibid., 180. 9. George Kateb, “Notes on Pluralism,” Social Research 61, 3 (Fall 1994): 511–37. 10. Ibid., 524. 11. Rosenblum, Membership and Morals, 325. 12. It should also be noted here that there are many examples of voluntary associations in which a vocal majority determines policies that don’t necessarily command widespread support amongst members, but that prevail due to member apathy or the procedural difficulties that ordinary members face in forcing them to be changed. 13. Rosenblum, Membership and Morals, 350. 14. This is not to say that national independence could not be defended on other grounds, such as the overwhelming support of group members, geographical separateness, or the existence of separate political and legal institutions in the national minority community. 15. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, especially ch. 2. 16. Iris Marion Young, “Together in Difference: Transforming the Logic of Group Political Conflict,” in The Rights of Minority Cultures ed. Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 165. 17. See Introduction, note 7 in this book. 18. Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” in Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate ed. Cynthia Willett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 26. 19. For a definitive statement of the class instead of race argument, see Richard D. Kahlenberg, The Remedy: Class, Race and Affirmative Action (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 20. Amy Gutmann summarizes and discusses these arguments in “Responding to Racial Injustice,” in Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 111. 21. Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious, 131–2. 22. Ibid., 169–73. Note that this is a problematic aim, though, as there can be no guarantee that minority graduates will see their identities and commitments

notes / 179 primarily in terms of group membership. Nor is it morally justifiable to place minority professionals under any greater obligation to serve the needs of their communities than whites are under. 23. See e.g., Richard Rodruigez, Hunger of Memory (New York: Bantam, 1982), 141–73. 24. Anne Philips, “Feminism and the Politics of Difference: Or, Where Have All the Women Gone?” in Visible Women: Essays on Feminist Legal Theory and Political Philosophy ed. Susan James and Stephanie Palmer (Oxford: Hart, 2002), 21.


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Index

Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, 102–104, 106 abortion, 32 affirmative action, 1, 56, 146, 162 n.116 African Americans, 14, 17, 83, 88, 109–110, 118 Afrocentricism, 14 Ahmed, Leila, 123 Alvi, Sajida Sultana, 130, 131 Amara, Fadela, 126 American Muslim Council, 120 Anderson, Benedict, 150 n.15 “angry white man,” 1 apology, 101–111, 170 n.23 Appiah, K. Anthony, 13, 16–17 Ashcraft, Richard, 43, 48 Ashcroft, John, 129 associations, see voluntary associations associationalism (associative democracy), 6, 61, 71–74 ascription, 12–19, 21, 51, 83, 105, 142, 145 Asquith, Herbert, 53 Attlee, Clement, 68 autonomy, 21, 55, 155–156 n. 99 autonomous agency, 12, 28–33, 78, 83, 155 n.88, group autonomy, 12, 140–143, 156 n.110 of national minorities, 19, 78–94 political autonomy, 11 weak autonomy, 5, 30, 78 Barry, Brian, 3 Benhabib, Seyla, 100–101, 104 Benn, Stanley, 155 n.88

Bentham, Jeremy, 39, 42, 158–159 n.36 Berlin, Isaiah, 22, 55 bisexuals, 16, 82 Black Power movement, 14 Bosanquet, Bernard, 51–54, 161 n.108 Bradley, Ian, 49 Braun, Carol Moseley, 170 n.22 Bullock, Katherine, 122, 123 Burrow, J. W., 42 Carlisle, Janice, 44 Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 121–122 Cayer, Carmen, 131 Cesari, Jocelyne, 125 character, 5, 37–57 national character, 5, 40–57; see also national identity Chartist movement, 42 Charity Organization Society, 53–54 Chirac, Jacques, 125 Cincinnati Community Action Now (Cincinnati CAN), 109–111 civilian review boards, 107–110 civil rights movement, 12–13 civil society, 6, 71–75 class, 7, 16, 36–57, 67, 82, 87, 146, 147 Clinton, Bill, 102 Cohen, Joshua, 31 Cole, G. D. H., 6, 37, 62, 65–69, 72 Collini, Stephen, 37, 52, 53 communitarian theory, 21–22, 30, 72, 78, 83, 91, 136 communities of fate and communities of choice, 21, 73–74, 141–143, 151 n.2, 165 n.71, 165 n.72 Constant, Benjamin, 5

196 / index Cornell, Stephen, 14 Couture, Claude, 167 n.32 Crenshaw, Kimberle, 171 n.44 culture, 12, 15, 69–71, 79, 87–88, 91–92; see also multiculturalism Dahl, Robert, 6, 7, 69–71, 95, 105, 136, 137, 141 decentralization, 7, 37, 71–75 deliberation (deliberative democracy), 8, 94, 95–111 democratic theory, 7 Dewey, John, 42 Donner, Wendy, 46 Dubois, W. B., 14, 84 Dworkin, Gerald, 29, 31 educational curricula, 11 empirical political theory, 6 ethnicity, 1, 9 ethology, see Mill, John Stuart Fabian socialists, 61 feminism, 11, 14, 83, 84, 88, 127–134 Flathman, Richard, 28 Fraser, Nancy, 150 n.12 French League of Muslim Women, 127 Friedman, Marilyn, 165 n.72 Frow, John, 102

Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, 119 Harlem Renaissance, 14 Harvie, Christopher, 54 Hayek, Friedrich, 68 Hegel, G. W. F., 49, 50, 62 Hill, Anita, 83 Hirschman, Albert, 60 Hirschmann, Nancy, 123, 177 n.97 Hirst, Paul Q., 6, 61, 71–75, 81, 93, 141, 144 Hobbes, Thomas, 60 Hobhouse, L. T., 37, 42, 51–53, 62 Hobson, J. A., 53 Hoodfar, Homa, 130, 131 Hume, David, 60 Huntington, Samuel, 121 Idealism, 5, 9, 49, 61–63 identity politics, 10–33 and autonomy, 140–147 and deliberative politics, 97–104 and group representation, 105–111, 172 n.1 and justice, 143–147 indigenous minority groups, 12, 94; see also subnational groups; Quebecois; Aborigines; Maori Islamophobia, 116–118 Islamic Society of Great Britain, 117

Gaus, Gerald, 48 Gaspard, Francoise, 127 gays, 13, 83, 88, 108–109 Galston, William, 28 gender, 7, 11, 12, 16 Glazer, Nathan, 120 Green, Philip, 136 Green, T. H., 36, 42, 49–53, 92, 106 Gray, John, 1–2, 21, 22, 135, 149 n.4 Guild Socialism, 68 Gunnell, John, 69 Gutmann, Amy, 12, 99–100, 149 n.4, 152 n.30

Japanese Americans, 102, 170 n.23 Johnston, David, 29, 155–156 n.99 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 82

Habermas, Jurgen, 99 Hacker, Andrew, 17

Labour Party, 56 Laclau, Ernesto, 2

Kateb, George, 140 Kent, Christopher, 54 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 32 Khosrokhavar, Farhad, 127 Kramer, Jane, 126 Kramnick, Isaac, 153 n.41 Kymlicka, Will, 7, 15, 35, 42, 77–94, 137, 144, 149–150 n.10, 167 n.32 Kukathas, Chandran, 2, 81, 87, 93

index / 197 laïcité, 124, 126 Larmore, Charles, 4, 19, 22, 27–28, 152 n.33 Laski, Harold, 6, 37, 62–65, 67, 68, 72, 142, 163 n.14 Leonard, Karen, 119 lesbians, 11, 13, 15, 88, 108–109 Letwin, Shirley, 36 liberalism collectivist, 67 and consumerism, 162–163 n.8 contemporary relevance of, 1–10 cultural, 7, 77–94 deontological, 30 and identity, 26–33, 96–111, 143–147 political, 19–33, 96 Locke, John, 21 Lomasky, Loren, 30 Lukes, Steven, 49, 60, 135 Macpherson, C. B., 42, 135 Malik, Iftikar H., 117 Maori, 106, 170 n.23 Marxism, 19 McDonough, Sheila, 130, 131 Mehta, Uday, 41 Milani, Farzaneh, 129 Mill, James, 42 Mill, John Stuart, 3, 5, 9, 29, 33–57, 79, 92, 132, 136 “Chapters on Socialism,” 45 “The Claims of Labour,” 42, 44 “Considerations on Representative Government,” 46, 47–48, and ethology, 5, 39 and identity pluralism, 35–57, 60, 106, 150 n.10, 162 n.116 On Liberty, 35, 46, 156 n.1, 162 n.7 and national identity, 9, 35, 40–57, 158 n.32 “Principles of Political Economy,” 43 On the Subjection of Women, 38, 43, 157 n.5 A System of Logic, 39–40 and de Toqueville, 44

“Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848,” 41 Miller, David, 9, 150 n.23 Modood, Tariq, 32, 116 Moon, Donald, 4, 19, 22, 25–27, 136, 137 Moore, Kathleen, 120 Morrison, Toni, 17 Morrow, John, 161 n.108 Mouffe, Chantal, 2 multiculturalism, 9, 35, 71, 77–94 Muslim Student Association (MSA), 119 Muslims, 7–8, 32, 113–114 as religious and ethnic minorities, 114–122 women, 122–131 Nation of Islam, 118 national identity, 5–9, 12, 67, 78–95, 137–138; see also national character, and subnational groups nationalism, 5, 27, 79 Native Americans, 14, 86, 106 Newey, Glen, 149 n.5 New Left, 96 New Liberals, 51, 54, 61 Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives), 126 O’Brien, Mike, 127–128 Okin, Susan Moller, 23, 86–87 Owen, Robert, 47 Parekh, Bhikhu, 36 Phelan, Shane, 17 Philips, Anne, 147 Piore, Michael J., 149 n.1 Plant, Raymond, 50 Plato, 102 pluralism cultural, 31, 35, 77–94, 119–133 early, 61–69 empirical, 6 identity, 5–6, 7, 11, 35–57, 60, 105–106 interest, 6, 35, 37, 59–75, 95, 105–106

198 / index pluralism—continued liberal, 6, 7 moral, 6, 19–35, 45, 59, 152–153 n.33 and national membership, 5–7, 35 and statism, 69 social science, 4, 6, 19, 69, 71 sociological, 5 in the United States, 69, 71 Pogge, Thomas, 80–81 postnationalist liberal pluralism, 9 Q-News, 118, 128 Quebecois, 82, 84–85, 93, 167 n.32 race, 1, 11 and religion, 114–122 Rawls, John, 1, 4, 5, 19, 22–25, 29, 89, 138 Raz, Joseph, 22, 55, 138 recognition, 7, 8, 11, 12, 17, 36, 90–91, 94, 96–104, 113–133, 138, 142–143, 147 redistribution, 3, 10 religion, 7, 16 and ethnicity, 114–122 Romanticism, 9, 29, 49, 88 Romantic individualism, 5, 38, 136, 155–156 n.99 Rorty, Amelie, 85 Rosenblum, Nancy, 29, 139–140, 141–143, 153–154 n.41 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 62 Runnymede Trust, 116 Rushdie, Salmon, 32, 116 Saeed, Agha, 120 Samuel, Herbert, 53 Sandel, Michael, 26, 30 Sanders, Lynn M., 101 Schmidt, Garbi, 119, 130 self-respect, 138–140 September, 11, 8, 117, 125

sexuality, 1, 7, 11 Spurles, Patricia Kelly, 130 Stasi Commission, 126, 127 Stonewall riot, 14 subnational groups, subcultural groups, 7, 12, 21, 37, 48, 70–95, 105–110 Tamir, Yael, 7, 77, 80, 87–90, 93, 137, 144 Taylor, Charles, 7, 17–18, 77, 85, 90–91, 138 testimony, 101–104 Thomas, Clarence, 83 Thomas, Timothy, 109–110 Thompson, Denis, 99–100 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5 Toynbee, Polly, 128 Trudeau, Pierre, 167 n.32 Utilitarianism, 36, 39, 42, 61 Varouxakis, Georgios, 40 veiling (hijab), 8–9, 118, 122–133, 174–175 n.44 (defined), 175 n.51 Victorian liberals, 9, 37–38, 49–57 Vincent, Andrew, 50 voluntarism, 5, 21, 26, 62, 81, 87 voluntary associations, 7, 12–19, 51, 54, 62–75, 141–143, 165 n.71, 178 n.12 Walker, Brian, 82 Walzer, Michael, 84 Webb, Beatrice, 54 Werbner, Pnina, 118 Williams, Melissa, 105–106 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 14 Wolf, Susan, 15 women’s movement, 11, 12–13 Women’s Social and Political Union, 53 Young, Iris Marion, 2, 14, 56, 95, 100, 102, 144

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