Cosmopolitan Pluralism: Beyond the Cultural Turn

Stephanie Lawson

doi:10.5130/ccs.v3i3.2288

Abstract

The ‘cultural turn’ has had a profound influence across the humanities and social sciences in the last few decades. In calling into question the universalist basis on which conventional methodological and normative assumptions have been based, the cultural turn has focused on the extent to which specificity and particularity underpin what we can know, how we can know it, and how this affects our being-in-the world. This has opened the way to a range of insights, from issues of pluralism and difference, both within political communities and between them, to the instability if not impossibility of foundations for knowledge. Too few studies embracing this ‘cultural turn’, however, pay more than cursory attention to the culture concept itself. This article suggests that conceptions of culture derived mainly from the discipline of anthropology dominate in political studies, including international relations, while humanist conceptions have been largely ignored or rejected. It argues further that we would do well to reconsider what humanist ideas can contribute to how ‘culture’ is both conceptualized and deployed in political thought and action, especially in countering the overparticularization of social and political phenomena that marks contemporary culturalist approaches.

Highlights

Approaches to the study of virtually all of the humanities and social sciences, including my own discipline of politics and international relations, have been strongly influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ in recent years
We look again at the relationship between culture, identity and political community and a possible way out of the ontological either/or trap
The real problem for the study of politics and international relations, and for any other disciplines or fields of study which have to engage with issues that cross any kind of putative cultural boundary is not how to avoid making value judgements about those who occupy what may seem to be a different set of subjectivities, but how to make value judgements that are wellinformed, reflexive and which take into account of both general principles about the human condition as well as the particularities of any given context

Summary

Introduction

Approaches to the study of virtually all of the humanities and social sciences, including my own discipline of politics and international relations, have been strongly influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ in recent years. Against the objective certainties supposedly produced by universally valid knowledge gleaned through the application of rigorous, scientifically grounded methodologies, the turn to culture has emphasized the particularities and specificities that underpin an irreducible plurality of knowledges and ‘truths’ possessed by people and communities located in different positions, places, hierarchies, times, spheres, structures, contexts and so on around the world. There is an enormous literature, especially with respect to the communitarian/cosmopolitan divide in normative theory, which reflects just how extensive and vigorous debates over such matters have been. We consider this divide in normative theory in due course

Objectives

Conclusion