Segmented Foundations and Pluralism 231- The preliminary grounds for this argument had already been sketched within the philo-
sophical perambulations of post-1960s liberals around the theme of pluralism. Mostly
these arguments were made in ignorance of the tangled conceptual history of pluralism
and group theory in the early twentieth century. - It is, however, worth noting that pluralism,per se, even when focused on an individualist
ontology, is notnecessarilylinked with liberalism, although much of the writing about it
has been. The work of political theorists like Jon Kekes and John Gray has shown pluralism
decoupled from liberalism. In the case of Kekes, pluralism has been developed in the
context of conservatism and in Gray within (most recently) an anti-liberal pragmatism. - Admittedly, even some recent difference theorists have found this whole idea intolerable,
partly because it still tends to essentialize groups—whether they are cultural, gendered,
or postcolonial. In this context, Iris Young, for example, has denied all ‘essentialism’
in groups and speaks rather of ‘relational involuntary affinity groups’. Theorists, such
as Homi Bhabha, have also spoken of hybridity and mixing of groups. James Tully also
sees all cultures as continually ‘contested, imagined and re-imagined, transformed and
negotiated...The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is thus aspectival’, Tully
(1995: 11). He suggests that societies should be considered as ‘intercultural’ rather than
‘multicultural’. It is not quite clear where this latter argument takes difference theory.