When the people are not reasonable: Multiculturalism and realistic normative theory in the contemporary era

Phil Parvin

doi:10.1177/1468796819866542

Abstract

In this piece, I offer an original and fundamental critique of a range of approaches to multiculturalism that have dominated the field of Anglo-American political theory since first-wave debates conducted in the 1990s/2000s. I suggest that the politics of the early twenty-first century, and especially the widespread rise of anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiments among citizens of liberal democratic states throughout the world, requires political theorists who seek feasible solutions to real-world political problems to reject these theories. I focus on two approaches in particular: political liberalism and the politics of difference. Neither offers a vision of politics that is tenable in the early twenty-first century, I argue, as they both require citizens to deliberate about political matters in ways that they cannot. In discussing these approaches, and finding them wanting, it is revealed that political theorists face a choice. They can present a theory which is realistic in the sense that it takes account of political reality and offers a strategy which might be used to genuinely inform a process of reform. Alternatively, they can abandon realism and also the desire to produce an operational normative theory which can resolve real problems in actually existing states. I lay out the nature and importance of this choice and explain some of its implications for the discipline and for our current political predicament. I suggest that the choice is unavoidable and that making it requires political theorists to make a more fundamental decision about the purposes of normative political theory itself.

Highlights

Multiculturalism is once again moving to the foreground of Anglo-American political philosophy, as political philosophers revisit questions of cultural recognition, minority rights, and identity and the ways in which theories of public reason, originating in Rawls’s later work, might be applied to questions of diversity (e.g. Gaus, 2012; Horton et al, 2018; Patten, 2014; Quong, 2010; Meer et al, 2016; Tebble, 2017)
The agreement motive coupled with the norm of rational dialogue that we find in embodied in the work of Scanlon, Nagel, Barry, Larmore and others results in a conception of political dialogue initially and ideally conceived as a full blooded exchange between moral equals, but which – through the voluntary actions of deliberative actors genuinely seeking consensus – ends up looking not dissimilar to the model of public reason described by Rawls, a model of political dialogue which moves from the ideal to the realistic in order to resolve problems found in -existing states as they are found in those states (Larmore, 2018)
I mentioned that questions of methodology and realism have moved to the foreground of normative political theory

Summary

Introduction

Multiculturalism is once again moving to the foreground of Anglo-American political philosophy, as political philosophers revisit questions of cultural recognition, minority rights, and identity and the ways in which theories of public reason, originating in Rawls’s later work, might be applied to questions of diversity (e.g. Gaus, 2012; Horton et al, 2018; Patten, 2014; Quong, 2010; Meer et al, 2016; Tebble, 2017). As Young put it, participants in political dialogue must ‘talk past their differences’ in order to arrive at a wider, thinner consensus on fundamental matters of principle, policy, and institutional design, which is to say that, like Rawls, she believes that parties to political dialogue should be willing and able to (a) adopt a reasonable standpoint with regard to their own ends and commitments

Results

Conclusion