although ignored by seemingly everyone but Berlin in the postwar years,
came back to the forefront of pluralist thought in order to justify and validate
diVerent ways of seeing and knowing the world. Key to this, as McClure
( 1992 ) argues, was the revitalization of feminist epistemology and the radical
pluralist potential in the multiple subjectivities suggested by Haraway and
other feminist theorists. Critiquing the singular identity required by the
modern state, McClure’s focus is speciWcally on the relationship between
pluralist understandings of identity and the important political possibilities
inherent in the recognition and validation of multiple subjectivities. Here, she
is one of the very few to use the recent focus on philosophical pluralism while
explicitly echoing and expanding upon the earlier generation. 2
Others resurrect the core of pluralism’sWrst generation without such
explicit recognition. Haraway’s ( 1988 ) descriptions of situated knowledge
and embodied objectivity were based on a metaphor of vision—that depend-
ing on one’s experience, context, or view from one’s body we can see and
understand the same object in multiple ways. In this sense, as with James,
only partial perspectives can be considered objective. Similarly, Deleuze and
Guattari ( 1983 ) inspired postmodern pluralists with their argument to return
to a focus on multiplicity. Empirically, they argued, we live in an age of
partiality, where we are deWned by the many and varied states, situations, and
groups through which we pass. These arguments, in particular their focus on
the way identity is constructed, resurrected James’ radical empiricism in the
postmodern context, and reawakened the pluralist political response to the
reality of diVerence. Politically, although again without reference to past
pluralists, MouVe explicitly claims a pluralist intent—starting political
analysis with the recognition of diVerence, and refusing ‘‘the objective of
unanimity and homogeneity which is... based on acts of exclusion’’ (MouVe
1996 , 246 ). These theorists illustrate that at the end of the twentieth century,
plurality again became the basis of a radical and critical political theorizing,
focusing on the meaning of identity, citizenship, and relations across diVer-
ence rather than on the unitary state or a singular identity of the citizen. 3
2 McClure ( 1992 ) is to be credited with the idea of three ‘‘generations’’ of pluralist theory; she tops a
short list of theorists (including Eisenberg 1995 ; Gunnell 1993 , 2004 ; Schlosberg 1998 , 1999 ; and
Seigfried 1996 ) who refer back to theWrst generation in examining current challenges of diVerence,
identity, and citizenship.
3 This resurgence of theory based on one form or another of James’ radical empiricism was
not always expressly ‘‘pluralist.’’ Given the negative connotation of the term, many political theorists
returning to issues of plurality instead began to focus on a discourse of diVerence. As Honig suggested,
‘‘diVerence is just another word for what used to be called pluralism’’ ( 1996 , 251 ). Theorists such
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