Abstract
This piece introduces the overarching themes of the special issue. It maps the current intellectual landscape, and describes the disconnect between a lot of influential academic research on cultural and religious diversity and political reality. It argues that the rise of anti-immigration and anti-diversity sentiments in many democratic states around the world renders conventional arguments for multiculturalism inapplicable in these states, and calls for a re-appraisal of these theories in order to assess their feasibility and persuasiveness. It outlines the contributions to the special issue, and analyses the themes on which they touch.
Highlights
If future historians of political thought were to look back on the late-20th/early 21st Centuries in order to pinpoint exactly when many of the most influential theories of multiculturalism which dominated Anglo-American political theory at that time became untenable, at what point in those decades would they settle?
Others will argue that the normative responses to cultural and religious diversity provided by political theorists during that time were never helpful, and never really spoke to the lived experiences of citizens living in liberal democratic states; perhaps because they were too focused on understanding minority experiences through the lens of this or that ideology, or too committed to controversial principles like freedom or equality or individuality, or not committed to these principles enough; or grounded in a philosophical framework which missed the key issues, or provided analyses which led to unfeasible conclusions, or unworkable solutions, or which produced solutions which were held to apply to all states but which were only applicable to certain states with specific constitutional or institutional arrangements
Rawls’s Political Liberalism, for example, gave rise to a new wave of theorising which emphasised the role of public reason in settling collective political and ethical dilemmas, as well as providing the initial normative background for liberal variants of deliberative democracy, which dominate Anglo-American democratic theory (Cohen, 1989; Gutmann & Thompson, 2004; Quong, 2010)
Summary
If future historians of political thought were to look back on the late-20th/early 21st Centuries in order to pinpoint exactly when many of the most influential theories of multiculturalism which dominated Anglo-American political theory at that time became untenable, at what point in those decades would they settle?. The majority of the most influential theorists working on the topic of multiculturalism in the 1990s/2000s were engaged in the search for a normative response to cultural and ethical diversity which could be incorporated into the governance of liberal democratic states in the real world.
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