Political Liberalism and Cultural Diversity

Abstract

One of the most important and divisive issues facing heterogeneous or culturally diverse states—and most states are culturally diverse—is the relation between these different cultures and the state.This question was raised initially in contemporary liberal political philosophy in terms of the fruitful debate between liberals and communitarians. Sandel, for example, criticized Rawls’sA Theory of Justiceand, by extension, all liberal theories for falsely abstracting from conceptions of the good, abstracting from culturallyspecific conceptions, and grounding his liberal principles in terms of an abstract Kantian individualism. Liberal theorists countered by complaining that communitarians falsely conceived of a single homogeneous community. Although Rawls’s revised defense of liberal justice in his 1993 bookPolitical Liberalismdoes not refer directly to the liberal-communitarian debate, nevertheless, his new grounding of liberal political principles, as principles which would be acceptable to individuals with diverse conceptions of the good, seems to justify liberal principles in terms of contemporary conditions, and, at the same time, challenges the relevance of those theories which appeal to any notion of a homogeneous ‘community’.