They give primacy to individual rights and liberties over community life and collective goods. Some liberals are also individualists when it comes to social ontology what some call methodological individualism or atomism.
Methodological individualists believe that you can and should account for social actions and social goods in terms of the properties of the constituent individuals and individual goods.
The target of the communitarian critique of liberalism is not so much liberal ethics as liberal social ontology. Communitarians reject the idea that the individual is prior to the community and that the value of social goods can be reduced to their contribution to individual well-being. Because our identities are formed dialogically, we are dependent on the recognition of others.
He discusses the example of the survival of French culture in Quebec. The French language is not merely a collective resource that individuals might want to make use of and thereby seek to preserve, as suggested by a politics of equal respect. Because of the indispensable role of cultures in the development human agency and identity, Taylor argues, we should adopt the presumption of the equal worth of all cultures A second justification for multiculturalism comes from within liberalism but a liberalism that has been revised through critical engagement with the communitarian critique of liberalism.
Will Kymlicka has developed the most influential liberal theory of multiculturalism by marrying the liberal values of autonomy and equality with an argument about the value of cultural membership , , Rather than beginning with intrinsically valuable collective goals and goods as Taylor does, Kymlicka views cultures as instrumentally valuable to individuals, for two main reasons. First, cultural membership is an important condition of personal autonomy. In his later book, Multicultural Citizenship , Kymlicka drops the Rawlsian scaffolding, relying instead on the work of Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz on national self-determination One important condition of autonomy is having an adequate range of options from which to choose Raz Kymlicka moves from these premises about the instrumental value of cultural membership to the egalitarian claim that because members of minority groups are disadvantaged in terms of access to their own cultures in contrast to members of the majority culture , they are entitled to special protections.
According to luck egalitarians, individuals should be held responsible for inequalities resulting from their own choices, but not for inequalities deriving from unchosen circumstances Dworkin ; Rakowski The latter inequalities are the collective responsibility of citizens to address.
Luck egalitarians argue that those born into poor families are entitled to collective support and assistance via a redistributive tax scheme.
Kymlicka adds cultural membership to this list of unchosen inequalities. If one is born into the dominant culture of society, one enjoys good brute luck, whereas those who belong to minority cultures suffer disadvantages in virtue of the bad brute luck of their minority status.
Insofar as inequality in access to cultural membership stems from luck as opposed to individual choices and one suffers disadvantages as a result of it, members of minority groups can reasonably demand that members of the majority culture must share in bearing the costs of accommodation.
Why not just enforce antidiscrimination laws, stopping short of any positive accommodations for minority groups? Kymlicka and other liberal theorists of multiculturalism contend that antidiscrimination laws fall short of treating members of minority groups as equals; this is because states cannot be neutral with respect to culture. In culturally diverse societies, we can easily find patterns of state support for some cultural groups over others.
While states may prohibit racial discrimination and avoid official establishment of any religion, they cannot avoid establishing one language for public schooling and other state services language being a paradigmatic marker of culture Kymlicka , ; Carens , 77—78; Patten , Linguistic advantage translates into economic and political advantage since members of the dominant cultural community have a leg up in schools, the workplace, and politics.
Linguistic advantage also takes a symbolic form. In addition to state support of certain cultures over others, state laws may place constraints on some cultural groups over others. Consider the case of dress code regulations in public schools or the workplace. A ban on religious dress burdens religious individuals, as in the case of Simcha Goldman, a U. Air Force officer, who was also an ordained rabbi and wished to wear a yarmulke out of respect to an omnipresent God Goldman v. Weinberger, US When it comes to extrinsic burdens, however, liberal multiculturalists argue that justice requires assisting cultural minorities bear the burdens of these unchosen disadvantages.
It is important to note that liberal multiculturalists distinguish among different types of groups. It offers the strongest form of group-differentiated rights—self-government rights—to indigenous peoples and national minorities for the luck egalitarian reason that their minority status is unchosen: they were coercively incorporated into the larger state. By contrast, immigrants are viewed as voluntary migrants: by choosing to migrate, they relinquished access to their native culture.
Another set of arguments for multiculturalism rests on the value of freedom. Some theorists such as Phillip Pettit and Quentin Skinner have developed the idea of freedom from domination by drawing on the civic republican tradition. Building on this line of argument to argue for recognition, Frank Lovett maintains that domination presents a serious obstacle to human flourishing.
On this view of freedom, we can be unfree even when we are not experiencing any interference as in the case of a slave of a benevolent master. We are subject to domination to the extent that we are dependent on another person or group who can arbitrarily exercise power over us Pettit , ch.
Frank Lovett has explored the implications of the value of freedom from domination for questions of multicultural accommodation He begins from the premise that freedom from domination is an important human good and that we have a prima facie obligation to reduce domination. He argues that the state should not accommodate social practices that directly involve domination.
As for practices that do not involve subjecting individuals to domination, accommodation is permissible but not necessarily required. Accommodation is only required if accommodation would advance the goal of reducing domination.
He discusses one stylized example based on a familiar real-world case: the practice among Muslim women and girls of wearing headscarves. A key empirical assumption here is that combating patriarchal practices within minority communities would be easier if the burdens on more benign practices, such as wearing headscarves, are lessened. He discusses the case of Mexican immigrant laborers with limited English language skills and limited knowledge of American laws and policies.
In contrast to the communitarian or liberal egalitarian arguments considered above, the basis for the special accommodations is not a desire to protect intrinsically valuable cultures or considerations of fairness or equality but the desire to reduce domination.
Mira Bachvarova has also argued for the merits of a non-domination-based multiculturalism as compared to liberal egalitarian approaches. Because of its focus on the arbitrary use of power and the broader structural inequalities within which groups interact, a non-domination approach may be more sensitive to power dynamics in both inter-group and intra-group relations.
Other theorists sympathetic to multiculturalism look beyond liberalism and republicanism, emphasizing instead the importance of grappling with historical injustice and listening to minority groups themselves. This is especially true of theorists writing from a postcolonial perspective. Such proponents of indigenous sovereignty emphasize the importance of understanding indigenous claims against the historical background of the denial of equal sovereign status of indigenous groups, the dispossession of their lands, and the destruction of their cultural practices Ivison , Ivison et al.
Jeff Spinner-Halev has argued that the history of state oppression of a group should be a key factor in determining not only whether group rights should be extended but also whether the state should intervene in the internal affairs of the group when it discriminates against particular members of the group.
Theorists adopting a postcolonial perspective go beyond liberal multiculturalism toward the goal of developing models of constitutional and political dialogue that recognize culturally distinct ways of speaking and acting. Multicultural societies consist of diverse religious and moral outlooks, and if liberal societies are to take such diversity seriously, they must recognize that liberalism is just one of many substantive outlooks based on a specific view of man and society.
Liberalism is not free of culture but expresses a distinctive culture of its own. This observation applies not only across territorial boundaries between liberal and nonliberal states, but also within liberal states and its relations with nonliteral minorities.
Bhikhu Parekh contends that liberal theory cannot provide an impartial framework governing relations between different cultural communities More recent work has emphasized the importance of developing more contextual approaches that engage with actual political struggles for recognition and give greater voice to minority groups.
Through detailed examination of how national museums in Canada and the U. Whether it be museum officials seeking to exhibit the history and culture of minority groups or government officials deciding whether official apologies for historical injustices are in order, they should respect individual and collective self-definition, respond to demands for recognition on terms that align with the terms of those being recognized, and accommodate internal contestation of group meanings.
As Tom argues, practices of recognition guided by these principles come closer to fostering freedom and equality of minority groups than existing approaches Some critics contend that theories of multiculturalism are premised on an essentialist view of culture. Cultures are not distinct, self-contained wholes; they have long interacted and influenced one another through war, imperialism, trade, and migration.
People in many parts of the world live within cultures that are already cosmopolitan, characterized by cultural hybridity. To aim at preserving or protecting a culture runs the risk of privileging one allegedly pure version of that culture, thereby crippling its ability to adapt to changes in circumstances Waldron , ; see also Appiah , Benhabib , Scheffler Waldron also rejects the premise that the options available to an individual must come from a particular culture; meaningful options may come from a variety of cultural sources.
What people need are cultural materials, not access to a particular cultural structure. In response, multicultural theorists agree that cultures are overlapping and interactive, but they nonetheless maintain that individuals belong to separate societal cultures. That we learn Liberal egalitarian defenders of multiculturalism like Kymlicka maintain that special protections for minority cultural groups still hold, even after we adopt a more cosmopolitan view of cultures, because the aim of group-differentiated rights is not to freeze cultures in place but to empower members of minority groups to continue their distinctive cultural practices so long as they wish to.
A second major criticism is aimed at liberal multicultural theories of accommodation in particular and stems from the value of freedom of association and conscience. As Chandran Kukathas , argues, there are no group rights, only individual rights. By granting cultural groups special protections and rights, the state oversteps its role, which is to secure civility, and risks undermining individual rights of association.
One limitation of such a laissez-faire approach is that groups that do not themselves value toleration and freedom of association, including the right to dissociate or exit a group, may practice internal discrimination against group members, and the state would have little authority to interfere in such associations.
A politics of indifference would permit the abuse of vulnerable members of groups discussed below in 3. To embrace such a state of affairs would be to abandon the values of autonomy and equality, values that many liberals take to be fundamental to any liberalism worth its name.
Working class mobilization tilts toward the redistribution end of the spectrum, and claims for exemption from generally applicable laws and the movement for same-sex marriage are on the recognition end. In the U. Critics in the United Kingdom and Europe have also expressed concern about the effects of multiculturalism on social trust and public support for economic redistribution Barry , Miller , van Parijs There are two distinct concerns here.
The first is that the existence of racial and ethnic diversity reduces social trust and solidarity, which in turn undermines public support for policies that involve economic redistribution. For example, Robert Putnam argues that the decline in social trust and civic participation in the U. Rodney Hero has shown that the greater the racial and ethnic heterogeneity in a state, the more restrictive state-level welfare programs are Hero , Hero and Preuhs Cross-national analyses suggest that differences in racial diversity explain a significant part of the reason why the U.
The second concern is that multiculturalism policies themselves undermine the welfare-state by heightening the salience of racial and ethnic differences among groups and undermining a sense of common national identity that is viewed as necessary for a robust welfare state Barry , Gitlin , Rorty In response, theorists of multiculturalism have called for and collaborated on more empirical research of these purported trade-offs.
With respect to the first concern about the tension between diversity and redistribution, Kymlicka and Banting question the generalizability of the empirical evidence that is largely drawn from research either on Africa, where the weakness of state institutions has meant no usable traditions or institutional capacity for dealing with diversity, or on the U. Where many minority groups are newcomers and where state institutions are strong, the impact of increasing diversity may be quite different Kymlicka and Banting , She argues that it is not diversity itself that leads to changes in trust and civic engagement but the politics of diversity, i.
The central issue, then, is not to reduce diversity but to determine principles and procedures by which differences are renegotiated in the name of justice Arneil and MacDonald As for the second concern about the tradeoff between recognition and redistribution, the evidence upon which early redistributionist critics such as Barry and Rorty relied was speculative and conjectural. Recent cross-national research suggests that there is no evidence of a systematic tendency for multiculturalism policies to weaken the welfare state Banting et al.
Both are important dimensions in the pursuit of equality for minority groups. In practice, both redistribution and recognition—responding to material disadvantages and marginalized identities and statuses—are required to achieve greater equality across lines of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, and class, not least because many individuals stand at the intersection of these different categories and suffer multiple forms of marginalization.
A politics of recognition is important not only on account of its effects on socioeconomic status and political participation but also for the sake of full inclusion of members of marginalized groups as equal citizens. Brian Barry defends a universalist ideal of equality, in contrast to the group-differentiated ideal of equality defended by Kymlicka. Colour-blindness has been replaced by colour-obsession.
Strangers must be seen and acknowledged, and we sense fascination at the sight of them. Then, it is hoped, the racist ogre will be silenced. The problem is only that racism does not rule out fascination. Racism is fascination of a certain kind. To be held in contempt, something must first be acknowledged. Racism is fascination taken to its logical conclusion.
Multiculturalists fail to notice the inherent worth of disinterestedness , to blend in and vanish in the crowd. Instead, it is subject of exclusion and exoticism — put on the pedestal to be honoured, scorned, or drenched with pity. Multiculturalists have been taught to hold neo-liberalism in contempt. But at closer scrutiny, similarities emerge. Recently, I saw a TV commercial where individuals from overseas —Thailand I believe — were performing dance rituals, swinging rods, and the like.
I sensed we were back to the era of motionless pictures, as the breakneck pace of images flashing by was due to constantly new snaps of imagery. It was colourful and superficial. Whatever it was about, it was not about Thailand.
It struck me, though, as I was watching these vivid images passing by, that they reminded me of how exotic minorities are portrayed by multiculturalists. Watching the speed and the carnival of disconnected images, and the lack of any scent or real life beyond the glossy surface, the dead and yet superficially enticing imagery of diversity had suddenly come to life. I realised why these stereotypical and lifeless depictions of far-off lands were so familiar.
They were already ubiquitous — in the form of colourful TV commercials. I understood why I was rarely caught by that kind of cultural enthusiasm. It was a smile hinting at your wallet. Multiculturalists are singularly focused on the exterior; our bodies, our skin colour, hairstyle, clothes, jaw bone, the shape of the skull — and the world of commercialism is obsessed with the same things. In the stereotypical advertisement for exotic cultures, filled with dancing, singing and laughing, with rods and sticks in all colours imaginable thrown about, at this point of intense fascination for seductive form and superficial aesthetics, multiculturalism blends with ultra-commercialism.
The entire idea of pluralism, diversity, richness, and perhaps the very notion of wealth, has been hijacked by multiculturalists and neoliberals; an alliance between an absolutely confused left, and an absolutely determined right. Thinking on Sunday. Actually, his comment says very little about…. In his Ph. Hence, their voters were not chiefly arrogant insiders, but….
A Leftist Critique of Multiculturalism. More Info. The discussion about diversity and multiculturalism in the West rests on a few commonsense assumptions: Diversity is left-wing and progressive. Using an intersectional theoretical and methodological approach, the scope and limits from both positions are shown. It concludes that only by integrating and intersecting the study of these variables in the study of cultural diversity will it become possible to advocate for democratic politics that emphasizes the specific nature of the differences, but within the principles of equality and justice.
Key words: cultural diversity; liberal multiculturalism; intersectionality; gender; inequality. Liberal multiculturalism 2 Kymlicka, in considered one of the most influential responses to how to study cultural diversity. As a theoretical-academic answer to the social struggle for recognition, 4 multicultural debate has produced confusion regarding the network of concepts dealt with and controversy on the definition of the terms it refers to.
The conceptual frameworks developed by various authors from diverse trends will define, for example, to which extent certain unmodified orders proper to each culture are going to be privileged. In this article we intend to go one step beyond, enriching the discussion on the conceptualizations of cultural diversity from an intersectional perspective, as a way to broaden the debate by presenting an alternative form to analyze and interpret this phenomenon.
The article uses the intersectionality approach to propose a theoretical-critical stance before the panorama of theorizations and conceptualizations in relation to cultural diversity. We review two of the most important theoretical stances on liberal multiculturalism in view of re conceptualizing their definitions from a theoretical-methodological perspective of intersectionality.
The debates in this trend sought to distance from essentialism and femininity definitions, sometimes assumed as universal and which overestimated the experiences of white middle-class occidental women in feminist thinking. These conditions are difficult to separate as they are simultaneous experiences of oppression: we cannot criticize racism without referring to sexism, classism, and vice versa.
The criticism to the essentialism does not come only from stereotyping the feminine, but also the masculine, at the same time it only refers to minorities, leaving aside the characteristics and differences existing in the majorities. This way, when we speak of cultural diversity we want to stress the need to understand it from its inherently and constitutively intersectional character.
This stance is supported on the principle that no culture shall be asserted without being aware of those sexist, racist and classist aspects comprised in it.
The intersectionality approach can be utilized as a theoretical-methodological tool to reflect on the limitations and scopes of the postulates of two of the most representative authors in liberal multiculturalism. The objective of this exercise is to review the possibilities to conceptualize cultural diversity from a perspective that includes in its definition not only the importance of cultural differences, but also its relation and interaction with other categories of power, as well as the inequalities derived from these.
In a debate on cultural plurality we can locate Kymlicka as one of the greatest exponents of liberal multiculturalism. Kymlicka ; ; 61 , as other multiculturalists such as Parekh ; , start from a common viewpoint: their opposition to the way liberalism approaches cultural diversity and the institutional design that goes hand in hand, this is to say, the construction of a unitary and homogeneous Nation-State.
In spite of this shared diagnosis, Kymlicka differs from multiculturalists in the way the problem of multicultural assertions has to be tackled, something that should not surprise us, after all our author is a liberal. The Canadian philosopher states that liberal multiculturalism tries to distinguish the importance of cultural identity protecting national and ethnic minorities, but guaranteeing the validity of certain basic liberal principles Kymlicka, Then, the State must adopt public policies that enable the members of diverse ethnic groups to express and promote their own identities, however rejecting those cultures that seek to impose themselves.
The starting point of this stance is to understand the relevance of social context as a requisite for the existence of an authentic and significant autonomous election. The connection of the statement with the communitarian thesis that defends the contextual nature of human beings is evident, with a preponderant nuance: such nature is only valuable as long as it contributes to secure a window of qualitatively significant options for each individual. Thus the need to recognize some rights of the groups appears, under the banner of a differenced and culturally oriented citizenship, to provide the minorities with the necessary mechanisms to face the discriminations they might experience from the majority culture.
For liberal multiculturalism, the dichotomy between collective rights and individual rights is false, as two sorts of restrictions or protections associated to them should be carefully distinguished: on the one side, there are external protections, i. Collective rights understood as external protections are absolutely compatible with a liberal theory of rights that intends to foster autonomy, while internal restrictions are unacceptable Kymlicka, This political proposal means to place, together with individual rights of liberalism and democracy, differenced rights in function of group belonging.
The challenge of multiculturalism rest on how to prevent majority societies from imposing their institutions on those from a different culture. Kymlicka is clear to criticize and pinpoint that the concept of multiculturalism is commonly used as an umbrella term to encompass a broad variety of non-ethnic social groups which, due various reasons, have been excluded or marginalized from the majority core of society —for example: the disabled, gays and lesbians, women, et cetera—.
Secondly, and following the feminist critique to multiculturalism, the emphasis on minority cultures does not even take into consideration that inside these groups it is possible to identify other minorities that also require attention, as it is the case of women in the contexts of patriarchal cultures.
Intersectionality appears thus as a systematic analysis model that makes it easier to deconstruct and analyze the internal dynamics of groups of collective identities from a non-colonialist perspective.
To the extent the author boasts that the granting of recognition and adjustment to the cultural difference implies the disappearance of structural-order problems, his stance —markedly liberal— loses sight of the importance of redistribution that, together with recognition, tries to accomplish social justice, beyond integration, assuming there are problems of political and economic order, in addition to the cultural. Fraser criticizes multiculturalism —and anti-essentialism 15 — for not being capable of relating a cultural policy of identity and difference with another social policy of justice and equality basing on a unilateral approach to identity and difference.
This tendency to deal with the difference as if it were exclusively cultural in nature shall be broadened by means of an approach that explains that issues related to it cannot be analyzed independently from material inequality, from differences in power between groups and from domination and subordination relations that occur inside the system. The first reproach focuses on the rather narrow and essentialist conception with which he uses the term culture that directly impacts the clear distinction and the diverse moral weight that the demands of two types of cultural minorities would have: the national ones and the voluntary immigrants.
This differenced treatment is supported on the chances each minority has to provide their members with a societal culture. Since national minorities —being subsumed by a larger State— previously had a proper societal culture, they meet the minimum conditions to provide their members with the necessary frame to autonomously develop, and thereby, they have to be recognized the right to preserve or undertake their own national construction and enjoy some form of self-government.
Legal immigrants, Parekh elaborates, are the other end. They are not national but ethnic minorities, they are neither territorially concentrated nor are fully institutionalized, their culture has been uprooted from its original context and cannot reproduce as such in other medium.
Moreover, the fact of having emigrated in search for better expectations also supposes a genuine desire to integrate into the new society. Because of these reasons, immigrants would not be enabled to exercise and should stop demanding the right to self-government and cultural autonomy, however they can demand to maintain some of their practices associated to their ethno-cultural identity, which will become faculties and exemptions that Kymlicka 75 and 76 calls accommodation rights.
On the contrary, such classification does nothing but to reflect a lengthy liberal historical tendency to outline on the one side, a sheer contrast between ethnic groups and nations, privileging the latter, and on the other, to establish a clear difference between immigrants and citizens. On the basis of the same distinction made between national and ethnic minorities , Carens and Young have criticized the rigid vision Kymlicka unfolds ; , as he only deals with antagonistic cases, omitting intermediate situations, as it would be the case of oppressed groups which, in spite of not belonging to those minorities Kymlicka focuses on, would indeed require the recognition of some accommodation rights Carens, ; Young, We find this would be the case, indubitably, of sexual minorities and women Cf.
Young, ; No less important, Kymlicka forgets —as we have stated— that minorities gather and behave in a complex manner in reality, obviating that inequalities derived from cultural differences must be understood as the result of the crossing of the effect of these with other important difference axes —such as gender, class, ethnicity, race and sexuality—, which makes their categorization difficult.
Even if Taylor is aware of the importance of the universality of rights and equality, for him it is preponderant to pay attention to the recognition of differences supporting this discourse:. And then, in the public sphere, where the politics of egalitarian recognition have performed an increasingly relevant role. This way, following Taylor, what is interesting for the defenders of the politics of difference is to stress the recognition of the unique and original identity of each individual and community, which must be protected to avoid their homogenization by the identity of hegemonic communities.
However, the author denies that this is necessarily so and acknowledges that in liberal thinking, and in some liberal societies, a different stance in noticed. From this, he states the existence of two liberal states: the one that intends to be neutral with the argument that individual rights cannot be restricted whatsoever, thus guaranteeing their equality for everyone; and the state that guarantees respect to the difference and does not pretend to be neutral.
The former represents the politics of dignity, which basically means that free and equal men have the same rights; therefore, the function of the State is to protect and secure those rights. In the latter, each individual and each group possess an identity and particularity that shall be respected, this way, the State is demanded to protect a set of practices, traditions and values that would make it possible for the individuals of the political community to identify with a determinate ideal of common good.
Taylor is closer to the second of these liberalisms. His arguments partly have to do with the affirmation of the principle of respect to minorities and with the fact that nowadays multiculturalism is a reality that spreads over the world and demands politics open to the recognition of cultural differences and collective goals. A way to solve the conflict between the interpretations that supporters of the politics of difference and the supporters of universalism make of the modern discourse on recognition, conceived by Taylor, is that of a liberalism substantially committed to certain collective ends, i.
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