Legal Ramblings
[ Thursday, January 26, 2006 (10:31 PM) ] ( link )
Radical multiculturalism: Here's another odd collision of two very different articles.
In Does Liberalism Need Multiculturalism?, Anke Schuster criticizes liberal multiculturalism in fairly strong terms. Here's how she describes the theory: For liberalism, the central assumption about human beings is that they differ in their aims and values, or, more generally, in their conceptions of the good. This kind of difference is first and foremost an individual one because it is related to human autonomy and the capacity to form conceptions of the good. Because all individuals share this human potential, they all deserve to be equally respected as persons. The norm of equal respect for persons is the rationale in liberalism of the normative imperative of adjudicating differing interests so as to achieve equality between individuals. Individual equality and individual difference are thus inextricably intertwined.
Most liberal multiculturalists subscribe to everything of the above. Yet while they accept liberal notions of justice as a minimum standard, they also phrase additional requirements for social justice and equality that go beyond liberal principles. These additional requirements are derived from a specific notion of difference that is distinct from the liberal one on two accounts. First, the politics of recognition focuses on groups (as collectives or groups of individuals) as bearers of differential features. Second, it emphasises the fundamental difference of human beings along the lines of cultural belonging rather than some commonality of humanity. There are different ways of justifying this redefinition of difference, yet all of them imply that cultural difference is more fundamental than individual differences of interest and in some way transcends them. Justice is, then, primarily a matter of recognising cultural differences.
Then, in The Great Divide (which puzzles about why Eastern and Western philosophy don't seem to relate), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad has this to say about certain strands of East Asian and Indian thought: This particularity of the individual contrasts with that great modern western idea, "generic" individualism. Under this notion, individuals are interchangeable; it does not matter who one is in biographical and psychologically specific terms. It is the general idea of the individual that is important, not the particularities of specific people. The rule of law, the formality of political institutions and the claim to universal rights have flown from this paradoxical idea of generic individualism, in which each person is equally like every other. In both classical Chinese and Indian thought, there is a contrasting "microindividualism": each individual in a sociopolitical collective has specific burdens and freedoms. . . . The implication in Indian and Chinese thought is of an infinite diversity of individualisms, a situation which generates many problems of equality and universality, but also suggests possibilities for political theories on how to live with fundamental difference.
The last line of Ram-Prasad's paragraph is what reminded me of Schuster's article. Liberal multiculturalism demands respect for idiosyncratic cultures and imagines a political community whose structure recognizes--and perhaps incorporates--these cultures. But Ram-Prasad suggests that Asian philosophy has an even more radical notion of the politics of difference premised on individual, not just group-based, idiosyncracies.
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