Abstract
One of the most distinctive features of the politics of our time is the demand by various cultural groups for the political recognition and affirmation of their distinct identities. This ‘politics of recognition’, or ‘identity politics’,2 has perhaps reached its fullest development in the United States, but similar tendencies can be observed in all the liberal democracies, including Britain. The groups making this demand have primarily been defined by their ethnicity, their religion, their gender or their sexual orientation: Hispanics, Muslims, women or gays, for instance. The demand is that the democratic political system should open itself up to these groups, should abandon procedures or policies that damage or ignore them, and should strive to give them equal recognition alongside the bearers of mainstream cultural identities. Although politics in the narrow sense is not the only arena in which this demand is made — as readers will know, there has been much debate within educational institutions about whether and how to give equal recognition to group identities in curriculum design, and so forth — it is the arena I want to consider in this essay.
An earlier version of this chapter was presented to the Morrell Conference on Toleration, Identity and Difference, University of York, September 1995, and to the Anglo-French Seminar on Political Philosophy, College Internationale de Philosophie, Paris, November 1995. I am very grateful to both audiences for their comments, and especially to John Horton for his very helpful suggestions.
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Notes
I shall use these phrases more or less interchangeably, as also a third phrase, ‘the politics of difference’, which is favoured by the political theorist whose work I shall chiefly discuss, Iris Marion Young.
This is the liberal multiculturalism defended by writers like Raz and Kymlicka. See J. Raz, ‘Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective’, Dissent, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Winter 1994), 67–79, reprinted in J. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) ch. 5.
I.M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) p. 116.
The issues here are best discussed by Anne Phillips in The Politics of Presence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
Young, Justice, p. 167.
Ibid., p.184.
Young addresses a similar critique to recent theories of deliberative democracy in ‘Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy’, in S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Ibid., p. 119.
Ibid., p. 97.
D. Miller, ‘Citizenship and Pluralism’, Political Studies, Vol. 43 (1995) 432–50.
Note, however, that this point cuts both ways. Supporters of identity politics generally assume that there are relevant similarities between the positions of women, blacks, Jews, etc., as the passage from Young I have just quoted illustrates. If we decide that there are big differences in both the nature and the political significance of these various group identities, then this puts the general case for a politics of recognition in question, as well as my challenge to it. There is a good critique of Young on this issue in N. Fraser, ‘Recognition or Redistribution: A Critical Reading of Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference’, Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 3 (1995) 166–81.
I draw here on the research presented in T. Modood, S. Beishon and S. Virdee, Changing Ethnic Identities (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1994).
M.C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
These examples come from Waters, Ethnic Options, pp. 23–5.
Waters studied Catholics, among whom Irish or Italian identities, for instance, were rated more highly than Scottish or German identities — so people of mixed ancestry would be more likely to choose to identify themselves as Irish or Italian.
For the idea of symbolic ethnicity, see H.J. Gans, ‘Symbolic Ethnicity’, in J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith (eds.), Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
See, for instance, David Hollinger’s argument that the ‘ethno-racial pentagon’ around which much American social and cultural policy is built is presenting an increasingly distorted image of a society in which crossbloc marriage has become widespread (D.A. Hollinger, Postethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1995) ch. 1).
See also here Appiah’s discussion of the dangers to personal autonomy that the politics of recognition may pose in K.A. Appiah, ‘Identity, Authenticity, Survival’, in C. Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. A Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Young, Justice, p. 172. In fairness to Young I should say that in other places she gives a somewhat less voluntaristic account of group membership, referring to groups differentiated by ‘cultural forms, practices, or ways of life’ (p. 43).
The depth of the gulf separating traditionalist from feminist views of the family is well brought out in J. Exdell, ‘Feminism, Fundamentalism and Liberal Legitimacy’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 24 (1994) 441–64.
This is not a hypothetical example. Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Islamic Liberation Party, is according to the Observer (13 August 1995), the fastestgrowing Muslim group in Britain. Its declared objective is to make Britain an Islamic state.
Charles Taylor has made a similar point about the demand that we should value other cultures equally with our own. ‘It makes sense to demand as a matter of right that we approach the study of certain cultures with a presumption of their value... But it can’t make sense to demand as a matter of right that we come up with a final concluding judgement that their value is great, or equal to others’. That is, if the judgemcnt of value is to register something independent of our own wills and desires, it cannot be dictated by a principle of ethics. On examination, either we will find something of great value in culture C, or we will not. But it makes no more sense to demand that we do so than it does to demand that we find the earth round or flat, the temperature of the air hot or cold.’ C. Taylor, Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition’, ed. A. Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 68–9.
Here I both draw upon and expand arguments made in On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) ch. 5.
Young, Justice, pp. 110–11.
Ibid., pp. 179–80.
Ibid., pp. 178–81.
It is true that under this arrangement there is still some incentive for the users of the non-public languages to assimilate to the public language, and that this may eventually lead to the minority languages dying out. But that incentive always exists: in any society that is not strongly segmented, there will be some economic advantage in speaking the majority language, and this may mean that, over time, there is a spontaneous tendency towards linguistic homogeneity.
I argue this more fully, and supply some supporting evidence, in On Nationality, pp. 135–9. See especially the study of American immigrants in J. Harles, Politics in the Lifeboat (Boulder, CO.: Westview, 1993).
Similar worries about an unrestrained politics of difference are expressed in C. Sypnowich, ‘Some Disquiet about “Difference”’, Praxis International, Vol. 13 (1993) 99–112, esp. pp. 104–5.
Young, Justice, p. 167.
Ibid., p. 190.
Including ‘In What Sense must Socialism be Communitarian?’, Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 6 (1989) 51–73; Market, State and Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) ch. 10; On Nationality, ch. 4.
See the very thoughtful discussion of this question in M.S. Williams, ‘Justice towards Groups: Political not Juridical’, Political Theory, Vol. 23 (1995) 67–91. Williams writes ‘To understand the justice claims of those whose perspectives and experiences are radically different from ourse ]ves, we must engage in the work of putting aside our own interests and attempt to understand how justice looks from the other’s point of view. But this requires a characteristic which is an attribute of will more than mind. There is no point in engaging in the difficult work of articulating justice from your point of view on the margins of society unless those who are listening have a will to treat you justly’ (pp. 85–6).
This latter error is not unique to the politics of recognition. Liberals of a more conventional kind also very often disparage or dismiss national identities, not appreciating the role they have played (and continue to play) in supporting liberal institutions. Historically this was not so: contemporary liberals should be made to read, alongside the famous first chapter of Mill’s On Liberty, the less famous sixteenth chapter of his Considerations on Representative Government, headed ‘Of Nationality, as Connected with Representative Government’. I have looked more closely at Mill’s defence of nationality in ‘Nationalism and Political Liberty’ (forthcoming).
See, for instance, W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship; C. Kukathas, ‘Are There Any Cultural Rights?’, Political Theory, Vol. 20 (1992), pp. 105–39, and exchange between Kukathas and Kymlicka in ibid., pp. 140–6 and 674–80; J. Waldron, ‘Can Communal Goods be Human Rights?’, in Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–91 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
If possible this should be done by indirect means rather than through a formal system of minority group representation. The danger with proposals of the latter kind is that, on the one hand, they encourage fluid group identities to crystallise, as I have already argued, and on the other, that they encourage the representatives who are chosen to behave simply as group spokesmen, rather than as citizens with concerns that reach right across the political agenda. See further my brief discussion in On Nationality, pp. 150–4, and the much fuller one in Phillips, The Politics of Presence.
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Miller, D. (1999). Group Identities, National Identities and Democratic Politics1. In: Horton, J., Mendus, S. (eds) Toleration, Identity and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333983379_6
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