Cultural Claims and the Limits of Liberal Democracy

Abstract

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson's theory of deliberative democ racy has been widely influential and the focus of much attention among liberal democracy theorists in recent years.1 This conception of democ racy has been favorably viewed by many as a successful attempt to com bine procedural and substantive aspects of democracy, while remaining quintessentially liberal.2 Although their theory of deliberative democracy has been subject to intense scrutiny,3 the theory's implications for multi culturalism have been largely ignored. In this paper, I attempt to fill this gap by carefully examining Gutmann's position on minority claims of culture, which is entailed by Gutmann and Thompson's theory of delib erative democracy.4 Although Gutmann allows certain accommodations of cultural claims by immigrants, she is adamant in her rejection of cultural claims made by national minorities5 whose cultures6 are by and large