Segmented Foundations and Pluralism 229- I am sure he cannot mean ‘the’ native element in American culture.
- The underlying template of this argument has been drawn from my chapter on
multiculturalism in Vincent (2002). - For example, the Hapsburg Empire, which was one classic attempt to deal with
multiculturalism. - Nathan Glazer, for example, suggests that multiculturalism is, characteristically, a North
American concept (linked to a strong rights-based tradition with deep immigrant and racial
divisions in society) and consequently has no real connection with European politics, see
Glazer in Joppke and Lukes (eds.) (1999: 183–4). - Lukes and Joppke offer a different typology distinguishing between ‘hodgepodge’ and
‘mosaic’ forms. The former implies intermingling and fusion. The latter idea—whose
foremost spokesman they see as Kymlicka—implies that individuals are linked to the
larger society through the prior membership of cultural groups, see Joppke and Lukes
(ed.) (1999: 9–11). They express their own qualified sympathy for the ‘hodgpodge’ idea,
on the basis that ‘cultures are not windowless boxes’, consequently there is considerable
interchange and overlap between cultures. - In contemporary political theorists this complexity of response to both pluralism and
diversity is partially recognized in distinctions commonly made between, usually, two
varieties of liberalism, for example, autonomy and tolerance-based liberalisms (Kym-
licka), enlightenment and reformation liberalisms (Galston), comprehensive and political
liberalisms (Rawls), procedural and non-procedural liberalisms (Taylor), or autonomist
and integrationist liberalisms (Walzer). - Raz does not appear that confident, however, in dealing with illiberal or nonliberal cultures.
In his book, theMorality of Freedom, he advocates toleration if such cultures are harmless. - Ideally, for communitarians, democracy should only recognize those cultures that respect
diversity or pluralism. - Consequently, he notes that ‘the insistent demand for common traits, goals, or purposes—
not in itself, because plainly these have their importance, but as the only basis for Canadian
unity—has the effect of delegitimating, and hence further weakening what is in fact an
essential element of this unity’, Taylor in Tully (ed.) (1994: 255). - The same implicit logic allows another apparently ‘communitarian’ theorist, Michael
Walzer, to even describe his own work as ‘difference orientated’, see Walzer in Benhabib
(ed.) 1996. He is also sympathetically considered by recent difference theorists, particularly
in terms of his conceptions of complex equality and spheres of justice. Iris Young (a more
overt difference theorist) comments that ‘Walzer’s analysis...has resonance with my con-
cern to focus primarily on the social structures and processes that produce distributions’.
However, she continues that he still addresses us in a reified liberal language which assumes
an impartial conception of reason and a unitary public realm, which disconnects us from
diversity (Young 1990: 18). She describes this ‘neutral reason’ as a ‘normative gaze’ which
‘expresses a logic of identity that seeks to reduce differences to unity’, Young (1990: 11
and 97). - Poststructural theory will be examined in greater detail in Chapter Eight. However, it is
important to note here that the postmodern and poststructural category interweaves with
the ethnographic, subaltern, and gendered perspectives. - Particularly the work of Partha Chatterjee and Ranajit Guha, see Guha (1982: vol.1).
- For Foucault, the categories of universalist liberal thought can no longer be taken for
granted, insofar as they have been deployed in the dubious projects aimed at ‘civilizing’
subjugated peoples and encouraging their ‘development’.