Culture and Equality

An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism

Brian Barry

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745622286, 9780745622279
• eBook ISBN: 9780745665641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

All major western countries today contain groups that differ in their religious beliefs, customary practices or ideas about the right way in which to live. How should public policy respond to this diversity? In this important new work, Brian Barry challenges the currently orthodox answer and develops a powerful restatement of an egalitarian liberalism for the twenty-first century.

Until recently it was assumed without much question that cultural diversity could best be accommodated by leaving cultural minorities free to associate in pursuit of their distinctive ends within the limits imposed by a common framework of laws. This solution is rejected by an influential school of political theorists, among whom some of the best known are William Galston, Will Kymlicka, Bhikhu Parekh, Charles Taylor and Iris Marion Young. According to them, this 'difference-blind' conception of liberal equality fails to deliver either liberty or equal treatment. In its place, they propose that the state should 'recognize' group identities, by granting groups exemptions from certain laws, publicly 'affirming' their value, and by providing them with special privileges or subsidies.

In Culture and Equality, Barry offers an incisive critique of these arguments and suggests that theorists of multiculturism tend to misdiagnose the problems of minority groups. Often, these are not rooted in culture, and multiculturalist policies may actually stand in the way of universalistic measures that would be genuinely beneficial.

PART I

Multiculturalism and Equal Treatment

1

Introduction

1. Losing Our Way

‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.’¹ That is the famous first sentence of the Communist Manifesto, which was given to the world just over a century and a half ago. In the course of time, the spectre came to life, but it has now been laid to rest, apparently for good. It is not simply that ‘real existing socialism’ has been abandoned everywhere except North Korea, which is scarcely an advertisement for it. Equally significant for its long-term prospects is the way in which within academia it has lost ground to the point at which it is not even attacked any more, let alone defended.

Both developments are to be welcomed in themselves. What concerns me is the manner in which the void left by communism and Marxism has been filled. The spectre that now haunts Europe is one of strident nationalism, ethnic self-assertion and the exaltation of what divides people at the expense of what unites them. Moreover, the precipitate dismantling of command economies has resulted in a massive expansion of material inequality and the collapse of the public services. The same trends in less extreme forms are also apparent in the affluent countries of Western Europe and North America, and in the southern hemisphere in Australia and New Zealand. Claims for special treatment are advanced by groups of all kinds while material inequality grows and the postwar ‘welfare state’ shows increasing signs of strain.

These developments have their counterpart, not surprisingly, in the world of ideas. Only now that it has been so thoroughly marginalized has it become clear how important Marxism was as a bearer of what one might describe as the left wing of the Enlightenment. What I mean by this is that Marx shared with contemporary Victorian liberals the notion that there was a universally valid notion of progress. He believed that the key to the emancipation of human beings from oppression and exploitation was the same everywhere. Although Victorian liberals would have disagreed about the institutional implications, they too would have held that the conditions for the self-development of human beings did not vary from place to place, though in many places entrenched beliefs and practices put the achievement of those conditions a long way off in the future.

In the course of the twentieth century, liberals have increasingly come to squirm at the dogmatic confidence of their Victorian forebears. They have had some reason to, since there is no doubt that the Victorians tended to attribute universal value to some purely local cultural prejudices, as we can see with the advantage of hindsight. Nevertheless, Marxism, so long as it remained an intellectual force, provided a stiffening of universalism to the liberal cause: the best response to the Marxist vision of universal emancipation was an alternative liberal one. With the collapse of Marxism as a reference point, however, there was nothing to prevent the loss of nerve among liberals from turning into a rout. With some distinguished exceptions, the ex-Marxists themselves led the way by embracing various forms of relativism and postmodernism rather than a non-Marxist version of universalistic egalitarianism.

Does this matter? It matters to the extent that ideas matter, and in the long run they do. It is true that the French Revolution would not have occurred without pervasive discontent with the ancien régime or the Russian Revolution without the disintegration of the Czarist empire under the impact of war. Similarly, it was the dislocation due to hyperinflation and mass unemployment that paved the way for the triumph of the Nazis in Germany. But there was nothing inevitable about the way in which the raw materials for upheaval were channelled into particular forms of political movement. Anti-Semitism, it has been said, is the socialism of fools. Whether racist scape-goating or universalistic measures to succour the needy are the response to a slump is not socially or economically predetermined. It depends on the persuasiveness of alternative diagnoses and prescriptions. Similarly, there is nothing inevitable about the way in which today discontent increasingly flows into the channels of fundamentalism, nationalism and ethnocultural chauvinism. The wiseacres who say that there is something ‘natural’ or ‘primordial’ about these forces merely reveal their historical and sociological illiteracy. It was said of the Bourbons when they were restored to the throne of France in 1815 that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The same may be said of those who pursue policies of ethnocultural nationalism and particularism, and also of those who lend them intellectual support.

Many of those who (like myself) lived through the Second World War hoped that the ideas underlying the Fascist and Nazi regimes were permanently discredited. Never again, we thought, would the world stand by while people were slaughtered simply because they belonged to a certain ethnic group; never again would the idea be seriously entertained that obligations to the nation overrode obligations to humanity. The Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War established the principle that there were crimes against humanity that could be punished by an international tribunal even though they did not necessarily violate the laws of the state in which they were committed. Then, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seemed to betoken a new era marked by the general acknowledgement of certain standards of decent treatment that were the birthright of all human beings, standards to which all states should be held internationally accountable.

These hopes have not proved altogether delusory. The notion of an ‘international community’ has become far more of a reality than it ever was before, as international agencies and non-governmental organizations have proliferated. The appeal to state sovereignty as the response by a government to external criticism is increasingly becoming perceived as ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’. The machinery for the prosecution of crimes against humanity is finally falling into place. Yet at the same time as all this is happening, western philosophers are apparently less and less confident of the universalistic moral ideas that alone make sense of efforts to enforce human rights and punish violators of them. An illustration is provided by the annual series of lectures held in Oxford that has been sponsored and published by Amnesty International. Although the subject is supposed to be human rights, what is striking is how few of the eminent philosophers who have delivered these lectures have offered a forthright statement of the case for their universal applicability.

My focus in this book is on ideas that are distinctly more benign than those underwriting genocide, xenophobia and national aggrandizement. They are, nevertheless, also anti-universalistic in their thrust. My concern is with views that support the politicization of group identities, where the basis of the common identity is claimed to be cultural. (The point of the last clause is to exclude cases in which group identity is based on a shared situation that does not arise from cultural difference, for example a common relation to the labour market.) Those who advocate the politicization of (cultural) group identities start from a variety of premises and finish up with a variety of policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, there is enough overlap between them to make it feasible to discuss them within a single book. The views in question are known as the politics of difference, the politics of recognition or, most popularly, multiculturalism.

Will Kymlicka has recently suggested that there is a ‘possible convergence in the recent literature . . . on ideas of liberal multiculturalism’.² This view, which he also calls ‘liberal culturalism’, has, he says, ‘arguably become the dominant position in the literature today, and most debates are about how to develop and refine the liberal culturalist position, rather than whether to accept it in the first place’.³ What Kymlicka says is true, but also in a certain way misleading. Thus, when he tells us that ‘liberal culturalism has won by default, as it were’ because there is ‘no clear alternative position’, he implies that almost all (anglophone) political philosophers accept it. My own private, and admittedly unscientific, poll leads me to conclude that this is far from being the case.

What is true is that those who actually write about the subject do so for the most part from some sort of multiculturalist position. But the point is that those who do not take this position tend not to write about it at all but work instead on other questions that they regard as more worthwhile. Indeed, I have found that there is something approaching a consensus among those who do not write about it that the literature of multiculturalism is not worth wasting powder and shot on. The phenomenon is by no means confined to multiculturalism. On the contrary, it is merely an illustration of a pattern that occurs throughout moral and political philosophy (and elsewhere). By and large, those who write about environmental ethics believe that the human race needs to change its ways so as to preserve the environment, while those who do not think this write about other things they regard as more important. Similarly, the philosophical literature on the claims of non-human animals is more tilted towards giving them a high priority than is the distribution of opinion among all philosophers. These are both causes to which I am myself sympathetic, but this does not prevent me from recognizing the built-in bias in the philosophical literature on them.

In my naively rationalistic way, I used to believe that multiculturalism was bound sooner or later to sink under the weight of its intellectual weaknesses and that I would therefore be better employed in writing about other topics. There is no sign of any collapse so far, however, and in the meanwhile the busy round of conferences (followed by journal symposia or edited volumes) proceeds apace in the way described by David Lodge in Small World. There are, indeed, wide-ranging criticisms of multiculturalism from outside political philosophy, such as Robert Hughes’s splendidly dyspeptic Culture of Complaint and Todd Gitlin’s The Twilight of Common Dreams.⁴ I have learned from both, but their focus is that of an art critic and a sociologist respectively. What is still lacking is a critical treatment of a similarly broad kind from within political philosophy, and that is what I have undertaken to provide here.

In the piece by Will Kymlicka from which I have quoted (as it happens, the introduction to the proceedings of a conference), he says, as we have seen, that there is ‘no clear alternative position’ to the multiculturalist one espoused by himself and his itinerant band of like-minded theorists. He then immediately outlines one alternative, which ‘would be to show that the earlier model of a unitary republican citizenship, in which all citizens share the identical set of common citizenship rights, can be updated to deal with issues of ethnocultural diversity, even though it was originally developed in the context of much more homogeneous political communities’.⁵ There is nothing in the least ‘unclear’ about this position: what Kymlicka means is merely that he disagrees with it. In my view it is not only clear but right.

The core of this conception of citizenship, already worked out in the eighteenth century, is that there should be only one status of citizen (no estates or castes), so that everybody enjoys the same legal and political rights. These rights should be assigned to individual citizens, with no special rights (or disabilities) accorded to some and not others on the basis of group membership. In the course of the nineteenth century, the limitations of this conception of equality came under fire with increasing intensity from ‘new liberals’ and socialists. In response, liberal citizenship has, especially in this century, come to be supplemented by the addition of social and economic elements. Universalism (categorical entitlements and social insurance) replaced the old poor law, which targeted only those with no other means of support; and the removal of legal prohibitions on occupational advancement was supplemented by a more positive ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’.

Although there was never a complete consensus on these ideas, and the practice fell short (to varying degrees) in different western countries, I think it is fair to say that political philosophers were reflecting widespread sentiments when they articulated notions such as these in their work. John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice can clearly be seen in retrospect to be the major statement of this conception of citizenship in all its aspects, including the assumption built in at the outset of an already existing ‘society’ whose members constitute a state in which the government has the power to determine such matters as the nature of the economic system and the distribution of wealth and income.⁶ Rawls’s first principle of justice, which called for equal civil and political rights, articulated the classical ideal of liberal citizenship, while his second principle gave recognition to the demands of social and economic citizenship. The first part of this second principle set out a very strong conception of equality of opportunity, while the second part (the ‘difference principle’) made the justice of social and economic institutions depend on their making the worst-off socio-economic group in the society as well off as they could be made under any set of institutional arrangements.

Hegel said that the Owl of Minerva takes its flight at dusk, and Rawls’s theory of justice provides a perfect illustration. Even in 1971, when A Theory of Justice was published, there were already (especially in ‘new left’ and feminist circles) attacks being made on the individualistic nature of liberal citizenship. Similarly, even back then books were being written about the ‘crisis of the welfare state’ – again more often at this time by those on the left than those on the right. Since then, criticisms of the liberal paradigm have grown in volume and vehemence: it is widely believed to be deeply flawed in principle. If anything even more widespread is the assumption that the postwar social democratic settlement represented by the so-called welfare state is unsustainable as a consequence of international competition and mobility of capital, the inability of states to run macroeconomic policies that will reliably produce full employment, the disappearance of jobs in manufacturing due to technical change, and so on. There is unquestionably some validity in the claim that the ability of a nation-state to transform market outcomes in line with an egalitarian political agenda is more circumscribed than it was in the era of exchange controls and import quotas. But the massive increase in the extent of inequality in Britain and the United States in the last twenty years is largely the result of the anti-egalitarian policies deliberately pursued by Thatcherite and Reaganite governments and maintained (even in some respects intensified) by their nominally distinctive successors, Blair and Clinton. These policies could have been different. If they had been, the context of the current debate about multiculturalism would be different.

I shall argue in the final chapter of this book that a politics of multiculturalism undermines a politics of redistribution. Until then, I shall focus on criticisms of the liberal paradigm as misconceived in principle. As a political philosopher, I shall direct most of my attention to the forms in which the thesis is presented in the work of other political philosophers. But I am pretty sure that these ideas also have a considerable resonance beyond the ranks of those whose academic speciality they fall under. I am not suggesting that the crisis of liberal citizenship is the staple of conversation in the average pub. Nevertheless, those who read the Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books or sample journals of opinion (across a wide ideological range) will have been exposed to a steady stream of popularized versions of the same themes, and it would be surprising if this had no effect over the years. I hope that this book will be read by at any rate some of those who have found such claims persuasive, because my object is, in broad terms, to provide an antidote. As will become apparent in subsequent chapters, I do not wish to maintain that there is nothing to be learned from the critics of the liberal conception of citizenship. But I shall argue that whatever objections are valid can be met by formulating it more carefully and making its underlying assumptions more explicit. Most of the criticisms, however, cannot be accommodated in this way, and I believe that these should be rejected.

2. The Flight from Enlightenment

Strange as it may seem for academics to repudiate enlightenment, it is noteworthy how popular the sport of Enlightenment-bashing has become in recent years. Especially among the pop academics and their journalistic hangers-on, it is now a commonplace that something they call the ‘Enlightenment project’ has become outmoded.⁷ But ideas are not like designer dresses. There, the latest fashion is the most desirable simply in virtue of being the latest. There is only one parallel to ideas: new fashions in ideas help to sell books as new fashions in haute couture help to sell clothes. But in the case of ideas we can ask a question that does not make sense in the case of clothes: is the latest fashion right or wrong? It is my contention that the anti-Enlightenment bandwagon is misdirected.

During most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, attitudes to the Enlightenment marked the main division between left and right in many Western European countries: the left embraced the universalism of the Enlightenment, while ‘[critics] from the right arguefd] that, by reducing all social relations to a set of abstract and impersonal rights, [universalism] tears the fabric of society to pieces’.⁸ Now, however, a variant on the same refrain has gained currency among those who see themselves as being on the left. These ‘have charged that [the Enlightenment’s] talk of universal rights remained oblivious to inequalities in gender, race and class’.⁹ According to them, the conception of equal citizenship embodied in equal rights needs to be replaced by a set of culturally differentiated rights.

The critique from the right is profoundly opposed to the whole set of ideas underlying and (more or less) embodied in the French Revolution. Without eliding the differences between, for example, Burke, de Maistre and Hegel, we can nevertheless trace a Counter-Enlightenment curre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Quotetion
• Part I Multiculturalism and Equal Treatment
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Strategy of Privatization
• 3 The Dynamics of Identity: Assimilation, Acculturation and Difference
• Part II Multiculturalism and Groups
• 4 Theories of Group Rights
• 5 Liberal States and Illiberal Religions
• 6 The Public Stake in the Arts and Education
• Part III Multiculturalism, Universalism and Egalitarianism
• 7 The Abuse of ‘Culture’
• 8 The Politics of Multiculturalism
• Notes
• Index
• Back Page