Multiculturalism

Expanded Paperback Edition

Charles Taylor, Amy Gutmann

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9780691037790
• eBook ISBN: 9781400821402
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism.


Praise for the previous edition:

PART ONE

Introduction

AMY GUTMANN

PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS, including government agencies, schools, and liberal arts colleges and universities, have come under severe criticism these days for failing to recognize or respect the particular cultural identities of citizens. In the United States, the controversy most often focuses upon the needs of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and women. Other groups could easily be added to this list, and the list would change as we moved around the world. Yet it is hard to find a democratic or democratizing society these days that is not the site of some significant controversy over whether and how its public institutions should better recognize the identities of cultural and disadvantaged minorities. What does it mean for citizens with different cultural identities, often based on ethnicity, race, gender, or religion, to recognize ourselves as equals in the way we are treated in politics? In the way our children are educated in public schools? In the curricula and social policy of liberal arts colleges and universities?

This volume focuses on the challenge of multiculturalism and the politics of recognition as it faces democratic societies today, particularly the United States and Canada, although the basic moral issues are similar in many other democracies. The challenge is endemic to liberal democracies because they are committed in principle to equal representation of all. Is a democracy letting citizens down, excluding or discriminating against us in some morally troubling way, when major institutions fail to take account of our particular identities? Can citizens with diverse identities be represented as equals if public institutions do not recognize our particular identities, but only our more universally shared interests in civil and political liberties, income, health care, and education? Apart from ceding each of us the same rights as all other citizens, what does respecting people as equals entail? In what sense should our identities as men or women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, or Native Americans, Christians, Jews, or Muslims, English or French Canadians publicly matter?

One reasonable reaction to questions about how to recognize the distinct cultural identities of members of a pluralistic society is that the very aim of representing or respecting differences in public institutions is misguided. An important strand of contemporary liberalism lends support to this reaction. It suggests that our lack of identification with institutions that serve public purposes, the impersonality of public institutions, is the price that citizens should be willing to pay for living in a society that treats us all as equals, regardless of our particular ethnic, religious, racial, or sexual identities. It is the neutrality of the public sphere, which includes not only government agencies but also institutions like Princeton and other liberal universities, that protects our freedom and equality as citizens. On this view, our freedom and equality as citizens refer only to our common characteristics—our universal needs, regardless of our particular cultural identities, for “primary goods” such as income, health care, education, religious freedom, freedom of conscience, speech, press, and association, due process, the right to vote, and the right to hold public office. These are interests shared by almost all people regardless of our particular race, religion, ethnicity, or gender. And therefore public institutions need not—indeed should not—strive to recognize our particular cultural identities in treating us as free and equal citizens.

Can we then conclude that all of the demands for recognition by particular groups, often made in the name of nationalism or multiculturalism, are illiberal demands? This conclusion is surely too hasty. We need to ask more about the requirements of treating people as free and equal citizens. Do most people need a secure cultural context to give meaning and guidance to their choices in life? If so, then a secure cultural context also ranks among the primary goods, basic to most people's prospects for living what they can identify as a good life. And liberal democratic states are obligated to help disadvantaged groups preserve their culture against intrusions by majoritarian or “mass” cultures. Recognizing and treating members of some groups as equals now seems to require public institutions to acknowledge rather than ignore cultural particularities, at least for those people whose self- understanding depends on the vitality of their culture. This requirement of political recognition of cultural particularity— extended to all individuals—is compatible with a form of universalism that counts the culture and cultural context valued by individuals as among their basic interests.

We encounter problems, however, once we look into the content of the various valued cultures. Should a liberal democratic society respect those cultures whose attitudes of ethnic or racial superiority, for example, are antagonistic to other cultures? If so, how can respect for a culture of ethnic or racial superiority be reconciled with the commitment to treating all people as equals? If a liberal democracy need not or should not respect such “supremacist” cultures, even if those cultures are highly valued by many among the disadvantaged, what precisely are the moral limits on the legitimate demand for political recognition of particular cultures?

Questions concerning whether and how cultural groups should be recognized in politics are among the most salient and vexing on the political agenda of many democratic and democratizing societies today. Charles Taylor offers an original perspective on these problems in “The Politics of Recognition,” based upon his Inaugural Lecture for the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Taylor steps back from the political controversies that rage over nationalism, feminism, and multiculturalism to offer a historically informed, philosophical perspective on what is at stake in the demand made by many people for recognition of their particular identities by public institutions. In the ancien régime, when a minority could count on being honored (as “Ladies” and “Lords”) and the majority could not realistically aspire to public recognition, the demand for recognition was unnecessary for the few and futile for the many. Only with the collapse of stable social hierarchies does the demand for public recognition become commonplace, along with the idea of the dignity of all individuals. Everyone is an equal—a Mr., Miss, Mrs., or Ms.—and we all expect to be recognized as such. So far, so good.

But the claims of equal citizens in the public sphere are more problematic and conflict-ridden than our appreciation of the collapse of aristocratic honor would lead us to expect. Taylor highlights the problems in the ingenious attempt by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers to satisfy the perceived universal need for public recognition by converting human equality into identity. The Rousseauean politics of recognition, as Taylor characterizes it, is simultaneously suspicious of all social differentiation and receptive to the homogenizing—indeed even totalitarian—tendencies of a politics of the common good, where the common good reflects the universal identity of all citizens. The demand for recognition may be satisfied on this scheme, but only after it has been socially and politically disciplined so that people pride themselves on being little more than equal citizens and therefore expect to be publicly recognized only as such. Taylor rightly argues that this is too high a price to pay for the politics of recognition.

Liberal democracies, pace Rousseau, cannot regard citizenship as a comprehensive universal identity because (1) people are unique, self-creating, and creative individuals, as John Stuart Mill and Ralph Waldo Emerson famously recognized; and (2) people are also “culture-bearing,” and the cultures they bear differ depending on their past and present identifications. The unique, self-creating, and creative conception of human beings is not to be confused with a picture of “atomistic” individuals creating their identities de novo and pursuing their ends independently of each other. Part of the uniqueness of individuals results from the ways in which they integrate, reflect upon, and modify their own cultural heritage and that of other people with whom they come into contact. Human identity is created, as Taylor puts it, dialogically, in response to our relations, including our actual dialogues, with others. The dichotomy posed by some political theorists between atomistic and socially constructed individuals is therefore a false one. If human identity is dialogically created and constituted, then public recognition of our identity requires a politics that leaves room for us to deliberate publicly about those aspects of our identities that we share, or potentially share, with other citizens. A society that recognizes individual identity will be a deliberative, democratic society because individual identity is partly constituted by collective dialogues.

Granting the totalitarian tendency of the Rousseauean quest for a politics that comprehensively recognizes the identity of citizens, Taylor argues that public institutions should not—indeed cannot—simply refuse to respond to the demand for recognition by citizens. The anti-Rousseauean demand to be publicly recognized for one's particularity is also as understandable as it is problematic and controversial. We disagree, for example, as to whether in the name of human equality and treating all people as equals society should treat women the same way that it treats men, considering pregnancy as another form of physical disability, or differently in recognition of those aspects of our identities that are distinctly tied to gender, such as the social identity of most American women as child-bearers and primary child rearers. We disagree as to whether African-American students are better served by public schools with a curriculum specially designed to emphasize African-American culture or by a curriculum that is common to all students. The demand for recognition, animated by the ideal of human dignity, points in at least two directions, both to the protection of the basic rights of individuals as human beings and to the acknowledgment of the particular needs of individuals as members of specific cultural groups. Because Taylor takes seriously the stakes on both sides of the controversy, he does not jump aboard any political bandwagon, or offer simple solutions where there are none.

Nor do Susan Wolf, Steven C. Rockefeller, and Michael Walzer, who in commenting on Taylor's essay suggest new ways of conceiving the relationship between our personal identities and our political practices. Wolf focuses on the challenges of feminism and multicultural education. Although the situation of women is often compared to that of disadvantaged cultural minorities, Wolf suggests that there is a critical distinction between the two cases. Whereas political recognition of the distinctive contributions and qualities of minority cultures is most often viewed as a way of treating members of those cultures as equals, political recognition of the distinctiveness of women as women is typically identified with regarding women as unequals, and expecting (or even requiring) women to stay in distinctively “feminine” and subordinate places in society. And yet the demand for public recognition by women is in another significant way similar to the demand made by many minorities. Full public recognition as equal citizens may require two forms of respect: (1) respect for the unique identities of each individual, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity, and (2) respect for those activities, practices, and ways of viewing the world that are particularly valued by, or associated with, members of disadvantaged groups, including women, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, Native Americans, and a multitude of other groups in the United States.

Steven C. Rockefeller rightly worries about the abuse of the second requirement, respect for individuals as they identify with particular cultural groups. If members of groups are publicly identified with the dominant characteristics, practices, and values of their group, one might wonder whether our particular identities—as English or French Canadians, men or women, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, or Native Americans, Christians, Jews, or Muslims—will take public precedence over our more universal identity as persons, deserving of mutual respect, civil and political liberties, and decent life chances simply by virtue of our equal humanity. Recognition of every individual's uniqueness and humanity lies at the core of liberal democracy, understood as a way of political and personal life. The liberal democratic value of diversity therefore may not be captured by the need to preserve distinct and unique cultures over time, which provide each separate group of people with a secure culture and identity for themselves and their progeny. Rockefeller follows John Dewey in connecting the democratic value of diversity instead with the value of expanding the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual horizons of all individuals, enriching our world by exposing us to differing cultural and intellectual perspectives, and thereby increasing our possibilities for intellectual and spiritual growth, exploration, and enlightenment.

Does this liberal democratic view downplay the human need for secure and separate cultural identities? It is probably impossible to say with any certainty in light of the relatively few developed democracies in our world. So for the sake of challenging this democratic vision, we might suppose that its ideal of individuals flourishing in a mobile, multicultural society (or world) does indeed underestimate the need of people as members of discrete ethnic, linguistic, and other cultural groups for public recognition and preservation of their particular cultural identities. Even in light of this challenge, the liberal democratic view offers a morally significant and politically useful antidote to the demand for cultural recognition as it is now commonly made on behalf of distinct groups. Liberal democracy is suspicious of the demand to enlist politics in the preservation of separate group identities or the survival of subcultures that otherwise would not flourish through the free association of citizens. And yet democratic institutions, more than any others, tend to expose citizens to a diverse set of cultural values. Hence liberal democracy enriches our opportunities, enables us to recognize the value of various cultures, and thereby teaches us to appreciate diversity not simply for its own sake but for its enhancement of the quality of life and learning. The liberal democratic defense of diversity draws upon a universalistic rather than a particularistic perspective.

What exactly is the universalistic perspective with which liberal democracy views and values multiculturalism? Building on Taylor's analysis, Walzer suggests that there may not be one universalistic perspective, but two, which pull liberal democracies in different political directions. Or, more accurately, there is one universalistic principle, widely accepted by people who broadly believe in human equality and incompletely institutionalized in liberal democratic societies: “Treat all people as free and equal beings.” But there are two plausible and historically influential interpretations of this principle. One perspective requires political neutrality among the diverse and often conflicting conceptions of the good life held by citizens of a pluralistic society. The paradigm of this perspective is the American doctrine of separation of church and state, where the state not only protects the religious freedom of all citizens but also avoids as far as possible identifying any of its own institutions with a particular religious tradition.

The second liberal democratic perspective, also universalistic, does not insist on neutrality for either the consequences or the justification of public policies, but rather permits public institutions to further particular cultural values on three conditions: (1) the basic rights of all citizens—including freedom of speech, thought, religion, and association—must be protected, (2) no one is manipulated (and of course not coerced) into accepting the cultural values that are represented by public institutions, and (3) the public officials and institutions that make cultural choices are democratically accountable, not only in principle but also in practice. The paradigm of this perspective is democratic subsidy for, and control over, education in the United States. At the same time that our constitution requires separation of church and state, it grants states wide latitude in determining the cultural content of children's education. Educational policy in America, far from requiring neutrality, encourages local communities to shape schools partly in their particular cultural image, so long as they do not violate basic rights, such as freedom of conscience or the separation of church and state.

Walzer sees the two universalistic perspectives as defining two different conceptions of liberalism, the second more democratic than the first. What Walzer calls “Liberalism 2,” inasmuch as it authorizes democratic communities to determine public policy within the broad limits of respect for individual rights, also authorizes them to choose policies that are, more or less, neutral among the particular cultural identities of groups. Because Liberalism 2 is democratic, it can choose Liberalism 1, state neutrality, through a democratic consensus. Walzer thinks this is what the United States has democratically chosen. And Liberalism 1 chosen within Liberalism 2 is what Walzer would choose, because it is in keeping with the dominant social understanding of the United States as a society of immigrants, where each cultural group is free to fend for itself, but not to enlist the state in support or recognition of its particular cultural projects.

When I listen to the discordant voices raised in recent debates over multiculturalism, I find it hard to say what we as a society have chosen, at least at this level of abstraction. Apart from the difficult, perhaps inescapable, problem of figuring out what “we” have chosen, perhaps it is a mistake to think that we have chosen, or need to choose, one liberalism or the other for all of our public institutions and policies. Perhaps the two universalisms are better interpreted not as two distinct and politically comprehensive conceptions of liberalism but as two strands of a single conception of liberal democracy that recommends—indeed occasionally even re- quires—state neutrality in certain realms such as religion, but not in others, such as education, where democratically accountable institutions are free to reflect the values of one or more cultural communities as long as they also respect the basic rights of all citizens. The dignity of free and equal beings requires liberal democratic institutions to be nonrepressive, nondiscriminatory, and deliberative. These principled constraints leave room for public institutions to recognize the particular cultural identities of those they represent. This conclusion identifies liberal democracy at its best with both the protection of universal rights and public recognition of particular cultures, although for significantly different reasons from those that Taylor recommends. The results of democratic deliberations consistent with respect for individuals' rights (freedom of speech, religion, press, association, and so on), not the survival of subcultures, come to the defense of multiculturalism.

Along with Taylor's essay, the comments of Wolf, Rockefeller, and Walzer are intended to stimulate more constructive discussions of the issues surrounding multiculturalism than those ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface (1994)
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part One
• Part Two
• Contributors
• Index