Journal of Political Ideologies (1996), 1(1), 53-73

Pluralism, multiculturalism and the

nation-state: rethinking the
connections*
WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY
Department of Political Science, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
Pluralism and the nation-state
Pluralism, in politics, is the interaction of diverse, overlapping constituencies
who divide and combine in shifting constellations. But traditional pluralism is
confined by the very nationalism its defenders often purport to transcend. And
multiculturalism? Is it post-nationalistic? Or does it refer to quasi-national
enclaves, each defined by a criterion of common identification that overwhelms
all others?
My sense is that the introduction of the term 'multiculturalism' into the
pluralist conversation signifies something, not entirely new, but distinctive
enough to deserve special attention. Multiculturalism, as a series of ideas in
motion, speaks to a distinctive time when declining empires find former colonial
peoples migrating to the imperial centers; when the globalization of economic
life enables affluent workers to cross national boundaries at a faster rate and
propels large numbers of 'guest' workers into alien states; when television and
other electronic media draw diverse cultures into closer proximity; when the
acceleration of speed in practices of communication, war, fashion, and political
mobilization makes the contingent and constructed character of what we are a
little more palpable.
Multiculturalism calls into question traditional pluralist presumptions about
territory and temporality. But it may do so in ways that sow confusion in
multicultural movements themselves. For example, the enclave version of
multiculturalism is in tension with this list of conditions and impulses out of
which the general movement has sprung. Moreover, this same set of conditions
foster fundamentalist reactions to the disturbing experience of contingency in
culture. If fundamentalism is any movement that insists upon the certainty and
exclusionary character of its own identity, it emerges above all as a reaction
*An earlier version of this paper was given at the Bohen Foundation Symposium on Cultural Diversity, New York
City, February, 1994. I am indebted to the participants in this symposium, and most particularly to Etienne Balibar
and Tom Keenan, for their comments.
1356-9317/96/010053-21 1996 Journals Oxford Ltd
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W. E. CONNOLLY
formation to the historic trend toward multiculturalism. And if these two
contending emblems of our time share the same general conditions of possibility,
it may be that multiculturalism contains traces of fundamentalism in itself.
Conventional understandings of pluralism look too complacent and exclusion-
ary when drawn into this conversation. But multiculturalism may look the same,
across different dimensions. The relation each bears to nationalism will be at the
forefront of our attention.
National pluralism
Alexis de Tocqueville provides the model from which many contemporary
portraits of pluralism are drawn, particularly in the American setting. You can
see its influence in the work of Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, Paul Ricoeur,
Isaiah Berlin, Michael Walzer and many others. None offers a critique of
Tocqueville. But the pluralist imagination of Tocqueville, while it appreciates
modest diversity between local governments, religious sects within Christianity,
and immigrants from European states, and while it attributes some positive value
to conflicts and disturbances in democratic politics, is territorial, national and
arboreal in form. Tocquevillian national pluralism is modelled like a tree. It
consists of a national trunk of common mores rooted in the soil of Christianity,
with numerous limbs branching out so far as their connection to the trunk allows.
Everything on the territory of 'America' branches out from this trunk. Any thing
that breaks off is dead wood. Let's get a feel for the trunk.
(1) The relation of Christian religion to secular reason and common mores in the
American nation:
In the United States it is not only mores that are controlled by religion, but its sway extends
over reason . . . Among the Anglo-Americans there are some who profess Christian dogmas
because they believe them and others who so do because they are afraid to look as though
they did not believe them. So Christianity reigns without obstacles, by universal consent;
consequently..., everything in the moral field is certain and fixed, although the world of
politics seems given over to argument and experiment.
1
(2) The relation of Christianity to the American cultural imagination:
The imagination of the Americans, therefore..., is circumspect and hesitant; it is em-
barassed from the start and leaves its work unfinished . . . Thus, while the law allows the
American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from
imagining and forbids them to dare . . . Religion, which never intervenes directly in the
government of the American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their
political institutions, for although it did not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly
facilitates their use thereof.
2
(3) The relation of civilization to morality, territory, nationhood and religion:
Civilization is the result of prolonged social endeavor taking place on the same spot, an
endeavor which each generation bequeaths to the next.
3
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PLURALISM, MULTICULTURALISM AND THE NATION-STATE
I would never admit that men form a society simply by recognizing the same leader and
obeying the same laws; only when certain men consider a great many questions from the
same point of view and have the same opinions on a great many subjects and when the
same events give rise to like thoughts and impressions is there a society . . . Anyone taking
the matter up from that angle . . . , will discover that the inhabitants, though divided under
twenty four distinct sovereign authorities, nevertheless constitute a single nation.
4
There is an innumerable multitude of sects in the United States . . . Each sect worships God
in its own fashion, but all preach the same morality in the name of God . . . America is still
the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over men's souls;
and nothing better demonstrates how useful and natural it is to man, since the country
where it now has widest sway is both the most enlightened and the freest.
5
Tocqueville identifies a set of correspondences between Christianity, morality,
common mores, secular reason, a nation and the political imagination. 'America'
territorializes this code. Anything that breaks the code must be forsaken or
excluded, not because Tocqueville himself entirely endorses each element,
though he does concur in most, but because once a nation identifies its 'great
social principles', it must introduce them everywhere. For only when 'a great
many questions . . . give rise to like thoughts and impressions is there a society'.
This American civi-national-territorial complex, in turn, spawns violence
against whomever or whatever breaks its code. Tocqueville, unlike many who
reiterate his model, acknowledges this. The 'Indian', for example, consisting of
millions of non-Christian peoples who preceded European 'settlers', must be
sacrificed. They lack the prerequisites for participation in the American nation.
That is: they lack agri-culture, beingin Tocqueville's eyesa 'nomadic',
wandering people; they lack Christianity; they, therefore have culture but lack
'civilization', which is 'the result of prolonged social activity taking place on the
same spot'. Regretfully, Tocqueville accepts the decimation of the Indian, the
sacrifice of millions of lives to the consolidation of the American nation. It is
because the 'Indians' traversed the land but did not occupy it, displayed religious
faith but lacked Christian monotheism, that one could 'properly call North
America', before the Europeans, 'an empty continent, a deserted land waiting for
inhabitants'.
6
The American holocaust is an unfortunate necessity, grounded in the onto-
civilizational conditions of a democratic nation. It is not exactly immoral for this
same reason. This combination places Tocqueville, the stolid moralist and
devotee of a Christian God, in an uncomfortable bind. But what impels the
combination? Tocqueville is driven to it by his implicit insistence, first, that the
civilizational conditions of morality must not themselves contain elements of
immorality and, second, that a democratic state must be grounded in a national
culture. Acknowledgement of a strain of immorality within morality would, he
fears, shatter the fragile crystal of morality itself. And pluralization of the
Christian, Angloid nation would defeat the political possibility of democratic
action in concert on the same territory. The price Tocqueville pays to secure the
appearance of purity in morality and the necessity of nationality to a democratic
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W. E. CONNOLLY
civilization is the demoralization of systematic Euro-American violence against
Amerindian peoples who preceded them. The Amerindian peoples pay a higher
price.
The Indian, then, is both the first casualty of the Tocqueville/American/
territorial imperative and a figure for a series of other others defined, demoral-
ized and degraded in turn by it. A reading of Tocqueville on women, blacks
(even though he opposes slavery), atheism, criminality and non-Christian reli-
gions would specify a set of others sacrificed in turn to the civi-national-
territorial complex, though most of these latter are never attacked so thoroughly
as the first American other. The 'atheist', for instance, is figured as an internal
reflex of the 'Indian'. His lack of Christian faith makes him amoral and nomadic.
The nomadism of the atheist takes the form of selfishness, restlessness, materi-
alism, and unreliability. Tocqueville thereby refers with approval to American
unwillingness to elect an avowed atheist to public office. And things have not
changed on that front since Tocqueville wrote.
While Tocqueville provides important leads for elaborating a model of
pluralism appropriate to the contemporary age, his national model of pluralism
must be revised and reworked substantially today. It was ethically unsuitable for
the world Tocqueville visited, let alone for the mobile, globalizing, multicultural
worlds we now inhabit. Its demands for a dense code of territorial universals
guarantees the continuous production of a series of domestic others (those within
who deviate from one or another item in the core code), foreign others (those
outside whose existence threatens the self-confidence of the domestic code), and
interior others (those aspects of any self or group that break the demands of the
code). These others pose threats to the Tocquevillian/American code of national-
ity even when they do not pose a military threat to the state or break its laws
against violent crime or subvert its practices of governance by democratic
election. They disturb the purity of the nation by being.
Todayunder new conditions of state and interstate politics unimaginable to
Tocquevillethe Tocquevillian legacy of national pluralism splits into two
contending visions. On one side are movements to denationalize pluralism,
drawing some sustenance from Tocqueville's appreciation of diversity in politics
and the positive role he assigns 'democratic agitation' in giving life to demo-
cratic politics. On the other is the drive to depluralize the nation organized
around invocations of a (now 'Judeo-Christian') God as the national basis of
morality, a Euro-centric cultural imagination, territorial borders closed to multi-
cultural immigration, and cultural war against every constituency that resists this
set of presumptions.
William Bennett, the former philosophy professor, Reagan Secretary of
Education, Drug Czar under Bush, and current Republican public philosopher,
proclaims the second side of the Tocquevillian legacy. Consider this invocation:
The first question . . . is: Why did the founders see a connection between religious values
and political liberty? Alexis de Tocqueville, the French statesman, historian, and author of
the classic Democracy in America, points to an anwer. 'Liberty regards religion . . . as the
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PLURALISM, MULTICULTURALISM AND THE NATION-STATE
safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the
duration of freedom. . . ' Americans today agree with Tocqueville. We are among the most
religious people in the world (a City University of New York study done in 1991 revealed
that nearly 90% of the American people identify themselves religiously as Christians or
Jews, while only 7.5% claim no religion).
7
Let us call the Bennett model the common sense of a nation of regular
individuals. Whenever Bennett invokes 'the American people', 'our culture',
'our children', 'the Judeo-Christian tradition', 'family values', or 'common
sense', he summons the imagination of a country in which each regular
individual is a microcosm of the nation and the nation is the macrocosm of the
regular individual. The church, the nuclear family, the elementary school, the
media and the university are institutions that must maintain these two primal
units of culture as reflections of each other. The endlessly reiterated phrase 'the
American people' captures this combination precisely: It at once speaks to a
widespread yearning for identity between individual and nation and conveys the
sense of a diverse set of constituencies, perhaps even a majority, falling below
this spirituality. It sustains the necessity of an ethnic, religious, linguistic center
in a democratic culture rapidly becoming one of multifarious minorities.
8
'The
American people' is exactly that ghostly spirit that necessitates 'The Fight for
Our Culture and Our Children'.
What drug users, drug dealers, inner city residents, non-European immigrants,
state bureaucrats, homosexuals, liberal church leaders, secularists, atheists,
liberal arts academics and liberal journalists share, according to Bennett's model
of the nation, is that each constituency contains a large number of individuals
who deviate variously as individuals from the spirituality of national individual-
ism. For every defection from the nation is by definition a product of individual
will: this individualism is the fundamental faith of the nation and a sign that
marks you as deviant if you defect from it.
Bennett know that this vision of a nation can only be pursued through
'cultural war' under contemporary conditions of life. His 'war on drugs' was one
operation in a series of militant campaigns in religion, education, media
reporting, public patriotism, and electoral politics. I concur with Bennett in one
respect. A cultural war to (re)nationalize the state is an unnecessary act of
cultural aggression against deviants from this imagination only if the Toc-
quevilleian model of a democratic nation itself is significantly exaggerated.
Is it possible to imagine a multicultural pluralism where the center itself is
more pluralized? To imagine, for instance, multicultural differences and inter-
dependencies across several overlapping dimensions, where no single source of
morality inspires everyone and yet where the possibility of significant demo-
cratic collaboration across multiple lines is very much alive? Is it possible to
imagine a multicultural regime in which a floating majority, if and when it
exists, becomes less anxious to fundamentalize what it is?
Consider a rhizomatic model at odds with the Tocquevillian image of
arboreal/national pluralism:
A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and
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W. E. CONNOLLY
tubers are r hi zomes. . . A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic
chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social
struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only
linguistic but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural and cognitive . . . To be rhizomorphous is
to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by
penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses . . . We 're tired of trees. They 've
made us suffer too much ... Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to
which it is territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterrito-
rialization down which it constantly flees.
9
The rhizome, first, brings out how national portraits of pluralism are rooted in
a metaphor they have neither interrogated closely nor compared to other
possibilities. Second, it shows how the demand for a hard core (a national
conception of civilization, an insistence upon mono-theism, or, its twin, mono-
secular reason) can itself produce irreconcilable conflicts, particularly when it
encounters contending forms of dogmatism posing exclusionary demands on the
same ground. That is, the rhizome calls attention to how arboreal regimes
themselves foster the very forces of fragmentation and suffering they purport to
be the remedy against. Third, it attends at once to the indispensability and
problematical character of boundaries, encouraging us to ask whether it is
possible to prize the indispensability of boundaries to social life while resisting
overdetermined drives to overcode a particular set; whether, say, the boundaries
of a state must correspond to those of a nation, both of these to the final site of
citizen political allegiance, and all three of those to the parameters of a
democratic ethos. Fourth, it calls into question the arboreal assumption that
political lines of connection and collaboration must rest upon a single cultural
trunk; it does so by suggesting how possible lines of political connection flow
in multiple directions when the relevant parties are not so deeply rooted that they
are unable to move. The contemporary imagination of 'difference' is so domi-
nated by the idea of identities with deep roots that counter examples posed to
debunk the rhizomatic imagination typically invoke deviant groups with deep,
exclusionary roots of their own which already break with the rhizomatic
imagination: fundamentalists, fascists, skinheads, citizen's militia, etc. That is,
the typical 'counter-examples' to the necessity of deep national roots are
themselves extreme embodiments of that quest; the exemplars often express
radical opposition to the state in the name of extreme devotion to the nation.
Finally, the rhizome calls attention to the relation between 'deterritorialization'
and freedom, attending to the element of freedom in those energies of deterrito-
rialization that open up new lines of pluralization.
Nonetheless, the rhizome is not by itself a sufficient alternative to the model
of a nation. What if one type of grass, say pampas grass, chokes out another
type, say European Beach grass? How could diverse grasses, now placed on a
human register, foster multiple lines of intersection within a general ethos of
forbearance and generosity? And what are the multiple grounds (or, better yet,
sources) of such an ethos, once the Tocquevillian onto-national ground has lost
its sacred standing as the singular source? Perhaps the possibility of a rhizomatic
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PLURALISM, MULTICULTURALISM AND THE NATION-STATE
pluralism arises initially out of a historical modus vivendi between multiple
constituencies thrown together on the same territory, a modus vivendi in which
each initially locates within its own traditions and traces of the other in itself a
set of moral and prudential limits to the domination or assimilation of others. If
and when such a condition becomes actualized the possibility increases of
several constituencies then becoming inspired to work on themselves to cultivate
a positive ethos of forbearance and generosity between multiple constituencies.
10
No singular, universally authoritative source of morality guarantees such an
outcome; its contingent historical possibility may indeed depend upon a
significant set of constituencies affirming the incorrigible fragility of ethics and
the contestable character of every traditional source of ethical restraint and
generosity. In such a context numerous constituencies would subdue reciprocal
and competitive drives to sink ever deeper roots, enabling several to appreciate
more robustly and comparatively the contingent, relational, and contested
character of what they are. Each would link resistance against its own tendencies
to sink the roots of exclusionary identity so deeply, first, to the imperative to stop
the flow of violence against other constituencies, second, to release selective
lines of collaboration with them, and third, to open up previously unforeseen
possibilities of freedom for itself to become other than it is. Several constituen-
cies could draw such self-conceptions into a general ethos of forbearance and
critical responsiveness to diverse cultural formations. Such a general ethos must
flow through a multi-cultural complex if diversity is to be cherished rather than
simply encountered. It need not flow from a single tap root (say, Christianity or
its modern, neo-secular offspring, Kantianism). Rather, it emerges best from
numerous sources. Such ethical intersections are not Tocquevillian in shape; they
resist the violent demoralization of violence upon which T-morality is grounded.
We shall return to these issues after engaging multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism
Is the multicultural imagination arboreal/moralistic or rhizomatic/ethical? It is
too soon to tell. But it may be possible to detect elements of both contending
within the multicultural imagination. When oppressed nationalities in Iraq (the
Kurds), Ireland (northern Catholics), Bosnia (the Muslim minority), Canada (the
Quebecois and aboriginal peoples), the lands occupied by Israel (the Palestini-
ans) demand recognition, they often demand territorial autonomy to organize
their national existence. Often they want to turn a putative nation into a
nation-state. The case on behalf of such a demand is that the condition of each
people reflects a history of oppression from those who dominate the territories
in question. The primary reservation against it is that each of these constituencies
itself harbors minorities on the same territory who may well be oppressed in
turn. There are times and places where the reservation must be overridden by
concern to rectify the historical effects of oppression.
But one dilemma of the late-modern time is that there is not enough ground
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for every 'people' to have its own national territory. The most fundamental
objection, not to the state but to the nation-state, is this: it is no longer a
universalizeable form, if it ever was. For every 'people' to 'own' a land, and
then for every landed, nationalized people to build a state, you would have to
erect multi-level garages on the face of the earth. Stacking territories so there
would be enough bounded land for each people. Many would not get much sun.
Then you would have to organize massive migrations, drawing each dispersed
people to the place assigned for it. Even hybrids, of innumerable sorts and
varieties, would require garage space. And these multifarious migrations would
then have to be ratified by prohibitions against intermarriage, travel, economic
intersection, so that the forces of hybridization and dispersion would become so
powerful all over again.
The nation-state is not a universalizeable form. This simple fact, comprising
most great theories of democratic politics in the 'West', either makes some form
of multiculturalism an ethical necessity within territorites or sets up a future
pattern of violent drives to nation-statism that make the American holocaust
against the Indian but an early shot in an endless series of civil wars.
We need models of multiculturalism that do not eternalize the wish either to
universalize the nation-state or to multiply something like minor nation-states
within large territorial states. Some strains within contemporary feminism and a
major current within gay/lesbian rights movements provide valuable pointers
here. Many in contemporary gay/lesbian political movements, for instance, press
against the abjectification of minority sexualities imposed by the naturalization
of heterosexuality in favor of a positive pluralization of sexual/gender identities
across the same territory.
11
The production of such a plurality, however, requires
modifications in the relational self-identities of straights, impelling many to
come to terms more closely with the constructed, relational character of
heterosexuality. This pressure upon the self-identities of established constituen-
cies explains the historical fact that every drive to pluralize identities in the
domains of sexuality, gender, religion, language, and nationality is accompanied
by the corollary temptation by dominant identities to fundamentalize what they
are. For, again, the effort to pluralize a historical pattern of being in any domain
also presses dominant constituencies in that domain to revise the terms of their
own self-recognition.
It is not too difficult to see how such a positive model of pluralization could
be adjusted to inform relations within and between diverse races, religions,
genders, ethnicities and rationalities traversing the same territory. For example,
if and when a minor 'nationality' (the term becomes extremely porous in this
context) within the American state (say, Amerindian, Afro-American, Japanese,
Jewish, or Irish) presents itself as a minority ethnic group, the pluralizing effect
of this presentation depends significantly upon acceptance of such a designation
of itself'by a previously unmarked, Angloid 'nationality'. For the first presen-
tation to proceed far, the latter must no longer insist that the (Christian) religion
or its Kantian offshoot, the English language, and the texts it accepts as
canonical provide the universal standard to which all others must be assimilated.
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PLURALISM, MULTICULTURALISM AND THE NATION-STATE
This shift in the self-recognition of a dominant constituency works best if it
acknowledges the shifting and historically contingent character of, say, the
sensualities, language, faith, and canonical texts that have inspired it the most.
The long term result of such a series of shifts in several domains would be the
historical transition of America from a majority nation presiding over numerous
minorities in a democratic state to a democratic state of multiple minorities
contending and collaborating with a general ethos of forbearance and critical
responsiveness. Such a shift has today become the best hope for democracy in
a world of states with porous territorial boundaries. For under contemporary
conditions of life, traditional gender, racial, religious and national constituencies
can only retain their standing as the official embodiments of 'the American
people' by waging cultural war against a host of 'minority' constituencies.
Today, the major historical alternatives are reduced to the national fundamental-
ization of democratic politics or the pluralization of democratic states along
multiple dimensions.
Multiculturalism enters the picture in this context of multifarious struggles
between the politics of fundamentalization and the politics of pluralization. It
does not, however, merely pose a challenge to national models of state politics
and arboreal models of national pluralism. // also embodies within itself a
quarrel between the national protection of diverse cultural minorities on the
same territory and the pluralization of multiple possibilities of being within and
across states.
Let's examine how one convert to multiculturalism responds to these issues.
Multiculturalism, Charles Taylor says, is founded on the idea that 'the withhold-
ing of recognition can be a form of oppression'.
12
Yes. But what form does
affirmative recognition assume? Rousseau, Taylor says, gave this question its
modern form, helping to define the form the quest for recognition would hitherto
assume. But Rousseau's model does not quite fit the demands of a multicultural
society. He demands close unity of purpose (on the same territory) so that when
one obeys the public will one is also obeying oneself. Equal recognition breaks
with the model of honor in which the recognition of some always involved the
debasement or obscurity of others; it involves each recognizing others to be what
everyone is fundamentally.
The Rousseauian model of national homogeneity thus creates a 'very small'
margin for difference. But Taylor does not quite concede how much the
Rousseauian model of equal recognition itself contributes to this result. It seems
to me, though, that the conjunction of unity and 'authentic' recognition (Taylor's
term) in Rousseau does not simply signal a shift from unequal recognition (the
old model of honor) to a model of equal recognition, with the latter then being
compromised by a demand for social unity that Rousseau appends to it. Rather,
the Rousseauian ideal signals a shift from one model of unequal recognition
to another disguised model of inequality in a homogeneous culture. The
Rousseauian model of recognition in a homogeneous community rests, for
instance, on confinement of women to the household so that each family will
speak in the public realm with one voice. But Rousseau does not (usually)
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interpret this to be an unfortunate injustice necessary to the unity of the nation.
The arbitrariness of subordination is masked by asserting that this status
corresponds to the authentic nature of women. Similar points could be made with
respect to civil religion, the cultural model of chastity, and so on. In each case
the demand to nationalize a populace itself produces a series of others on the
same territory to be corrected, improved, subordinated, punished or expelled. If
Taylor goes all the way with the 'Rousseauian' logic of recognition in a
homogeneous community he undercuts his commitment to multiculturalism; if
he breaks with 'Rousseau' he undercuts his corollary drive to vindicate intrinsic
identities within authentic communities. Taylor responds to this dilemma with a
compromise formation, an enclave-tnulticulturalism within the territorial state
that speaks only to a couple of the pressing issues of diversification today.
Taylor's two prime examples of constituencies who must be recognized in
Canada today, the Quebecois and aboriginal peoples, are territorially encased.
This territorialization makes it possible to dream of each becoming a community
of equals (a quasi-nation) within a larger, heterogeneous state. But this model of
multiculturalism simply does not fit a lot of cases (e.g. women, gays, lesbians,
atheists, several racial, religious and ethnic minorities) dispersed across the
space of a territorial state. Taylor's focus on territorial constituencies thus
expresses a residual commitment to the Rousseauian model of recognition.
Taylor considers two models of liberalism, the first of which he finds to be
'guilty as charged' in its blindness to difference. The first model, finding
differences in conceptions of the good life within any society to be unamenable
to rational resolution, commits itself to a procedural republic in which the state
treats everyone fairly while remaining 'neutral' with respect to alternative
conceptions of the good life. But, this conception first pretends that such
neutrality is possible and then condemns the Quebecois for breaking the code of
neutrality in its laws about language use. 'Difference blind' liberalism is
unconsciously rude to minority cultures.
Taylor thinks a second version of liberalism comes closest to giving priority
to certain collective goals while respecting cultural diversity. On this (quasi-
Tocquevillian) model, a society can be committed to a particular conception of
the good life 'without this being seen as a depreciation of those who do not
personally share the definition'.
13
This is accomplished by giving certain rights
to all members as individuals, including rights to free speech, freedom of
religion, and trial by jury, while promoting the prerogatives of a territorially
contiguous culture whose existence would be jeopardized without those prerog-
atives. Taylor thus seeks to protect the Quebecois and aboriginal peoples while
giving primacy to certain collective goals in Canada as a whole. The 'Canadian
problem', as he recognizes it,
arises from the fact that there are substantial numbers of people who are citizens and also
belong to the culture that calls into question our philosophical boundaries. The challenge
is to deal with their sense of marginalization without compromising our basic political
principles.
14
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But the generosity of this combination depends upon what is included within
'our philosophical boundaries' and what 'compromising' them involves. Taylor
is hesitant here. Included in 'our boundaries' are those fundamental rights
already noted. But what else? We may detect other elements in the 'our' by
attending to Taylor's most generous formulation of the 'favorable presumptions'
'we' offer minority cultures within 'our' civilization. Here is Taylor's presump-
tion, presented, fairly enough, as an 'act of faith'.
As a presumption, the claim is that all human cultures that have animated whole cultures
over some considerable stretch of time have something important to say to all human
beings ... What has to happen is what Gadamer has called a 'fusion of horizons'. We learn
to move in a broader horizon, within which what we have formerly taken for granted as the
background to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside the different back-
ground of formerly unfamiliar cultures.
15
Taylor contends that through the fusion of horizons you cultivate a capacity for
appreciation and judgment that exceeds the categories with which either side
began. For instance, the Quebecois demand to secure their culture through
self-protective legislation will not now be seen as such a deep affront to
individual rights; and the rights of dissenting minorities within Quebec will be
given procedural protection. This discussion is important, both in its conception
of how ethical judgment proceeds at its best and in the preliminary presumption
with which it starts. But what limits are set by Taylor on the effects the fusion
of horizons might have on constituencies? Could it render 'whole cultures' more
alert to the contingent character of what they are and more responsive to the
essentially contestable character of presumptions built into their respective
identities?
16
Taylor stops fusing horizons just when these questions become most
pertinent.
To summarize, the following presumptions in Taylor's multiculturalism
seem to me to be problematical. First, by focussing attention on territorially
based minorities ('whole cultures') he deflects attention from numerous
minority constituencies dispersed across the territories in question. Second, by
de-emphasizing the extent to which the contemporary condition of aboriginal
peoples results from the history of Christian/secular/territorial conquest thought
by its (Tocquevillian/American) agents to be necessary to civilization itself she
deflects attention from persistent features within Christian/secular moralities that
foster the evils to be redressed. Third, by insisting that a culture must have been
around for a considerable 'stretch of time' before it receives this presumption of
faith, he smuggles a teleological ontology into the prose of multiculturalism and
deflates the politics of pluralization by which a new constituency is formed out
of the injuries and identifications imposed upon it. Fourth, by modestly and
hesitantly adjusting the Rousseauian model of reciprocal recognition, he fails to
engage the possibility that the dignified recognition by dominant constituencies
of a new identity also propels them to acknowledge profound elements of
difference and contingency in themselves. Fifth, by gesturing toward the (Chris-
tian) anchor of morality in the commands or love of a god Taylor may give too
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much privilege to the very ground of morality that most needs to be contested
and pluralized in a multicultural world.
Toward a positive vision of pluralism
Secularism, presenting itself in Euro-American states as the alternative to both
Christendom and Christian nationalization may be a little closer to its adversary
than its proponents recognize. Tocqueville recognizes this. He recognizes the
Christian church to be the 'first political institution' of America; its themes enter
silently into secular reason and imagination. So the separation of church and
state does not, according to him, place Christian faith outside politics. Rather,
the contours of faith insinuate themselves into the structure of secular politics.
17
Taylor, too, recognizes that from the perspective of a faith such as Islam the
American distinction between the secular and the sacred looks very Christian.
Seculere, in Christian Latin, means 'the world', as opposed to the church or
heaven. It means, according to the OED, 'belonging to the world and its affairs
as distinguished from the church and religion'. The early church recognized the
secular realm, but treated the secular as residual, disconnected from that which
is most fundamental and authoritative. The Christian secular is thus the profane
that is limited and suspect even while necessary to wordly life. This dependent,
derivative sense of the secular persists for centuries, so that Ben Franklin is
moved to say, ironically, that he speaks as 'a mere secular man', and so that
William Gladstone could reiterate with confidence that 'I do not believe that
secular motives are adequate either to propel or restrain our race'. William
Bennett continues the Tocquevillian tradition with respect to church/state rela-
tions.
Eventually, though, secularism breaks out as a set of doctrines designed to
prevent struggles between Christian sects from tearing apart the fabric of public
life. Again, the OED suggests this 'secular' development (in long, worldly time)
when it defines modern secularism as 'the doctrine that morality should be based
solely in regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life to the exclusion
of all considerations drawn from belief in God or in a future state'. Secularism
now emerges as a counterpoint to Christian conceptions of morality, even if the
cultural space it makes available is more precarious than, say, radical and liberal
secularists of the nineteenth century expected it to be by the late-twentieth
century. But what if secularism remains, on points crucial to pluralism, too close
to the partner it struggles against? And what if these affinities contribute to the
periodic return of violent fundamentalisms in western states?
18
Both the celebration and lament of the (precarious) victory of the secular
underplay the degree to which the Christian sacred remains buried in it. The
rewritings of the Augustinian Genesis (which was itself a profound rewriting) in
Hobbesian, Lockeian and Rousseauian renderings of the state of nature represent
critical moments in this development. Rousseau's version is exemplary because
it both modifies the Christian sacred and provides a formula through which the
secular eventually comes into its own. Rousseau insists that 'everything is good
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as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, everything degenerates in the
hands of man'.
19
By treating the fall as the after-effect of natural innocence, he
relieves humanity of the primordial guilt Augustine builds into the first human
act. We fall again and again because the shape of each new set of circumstances
typically exceeds the limited experience we draw upon to respond. This is the
Rousseauian appreciation of contingency. We have just enough experience to
measure each new evil but not enough to avoid future ones generated by the line
of escape we adopt; this deficit can be reduced only in a culture that curtails
sharply its pace of change and contact with foreign cultures. In a culture that
takes the form of a nation.
The Rousseauian rewriting of Genesis does not seek a return to the state of
nature. It does demand a civilizational ground of morality as automatic and
authoritative in its way as innocence was in the state of nature. The Rousseauian
ideal of equal recognition in a unified territorial republic thus seeks a moral
identity that simultaneously repairs and transcends the condition from which we
have fallen.
20
It is pertinent to recall how indebted Tocqueville and Taylor are to Rousseau,
to his conception of recognition, his conception of territory, his conception of a
national will, his demand for a deep ground of morality, his insistence that
public morality itself must not appear ambiguous, and his drive to slow the pace
of cultural change. Tocqueville and Taylor both loosen the intercoded set of
demands governing Rousseau, but each remains a Rousseauian pluralist. Each is
pulled by the impossible ideal of alignment between national identity and
territorial space. Rousseau, Tocqueville, Bennett and Taylor all love trees. But
Taylor is the one on this list best equipped to enter into relations of agonistic
respect and selective collaboration with constituencies honoring identities and
moral sources significantly different from his own. He simply requires access to
an alternative vision that brings out alternative lines of possibility.
This is the triple plea lodged within several contemporary Christian/secular
political doctrines: the moral must be without fundamental ambiguity in itself; it
must rest upon an authoritative ground; and the authoritative ground must
provide the anchor of a territorial, national state. Secular conceptions of the
state of nature, the social contract, universal rights, the transcendental subject,
the original position, a rational consensus, deliberative rationality, attunement to
an intrinsic purpose in being, and utility all gravitate toward these demands, even
though most advocates eventually conceded that the 'regulative ideal' in ques-
tion cannot be realized fully. Some of these same advocates then take recourse
in a monotheistic god as a 'postulate' or final 'source' of the morality they
endorse.
These connections between the sacred and the secular in predominantly
Christian societies support two complementary models of identity in politics.
Those versions of modern Christianity hitched to nationalism tend to transcen-
dentalize the identities they admire the most; while modern versions of secular
nationalism tend to naturalize or exceptionalize them. Each tradition also
contains a subordinate drive to the mode of essentialism given primacy by the
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other. The allergies of representatives from both traditions to the intellectual
practices of genealogy and deconstruction signify their attachments to these two
tendencies. They embody the fear that deconstruction of deep moral sources
and/or natural identities would mean the loss of ethical direction itself rather,
than say, its enhancement by coming to terms more profoundly with closures and
dogmatisms inhabiting any ethic or identity.
Indeed, Christianity is sometimes more productively divided against itself
today than conventional secularism, on the issues of most profound import-
ance.
21
But drives to transcendentalization and naturalization must be challenged
from outside as well as inside this duopoly, contesting the demand to have public
media, films, schools, military organizations, literary texts, faculty meetings, talk
shows and neighborhood gossip ratify as intrinsic, universal or neutral what has
become national regularity in religion, sexuality, race, rationality, class, or
gender.
Multicultural pluralization introduces alternative conceptions and sources of
ethics into this historical duopoly; it pluralizes the sacred/secular duopoly
without eliminating either party as a major player. It taps into subsidiary eddies
and currents already flowing through this duopoly to foster generous possibilities
of agonistic respect and selective collaboration between diverse constituencies
thrown together in historically contingent, territorial relations of interdependence
and strife.
Let me start with a conception of identity and difference that invokes such an
alternative. As I see it, the very drive to secure an intrinsic, self-sufficient,
transcendental, or national identity tempts its bearers to secure that standing by
defining as evil, irrational, abject, or abnormal some otherwise harmless differ-
ences they themselves depend upon to specify what they are. Agents of intrinsic
identity convert these human signifiers of uncertainty, dependence or incom-
pleteness in what they are into expressions of evil or defect. For even when the
differences in question do not threaten the livelihood, security or ontological
necessities of civilization itself, they do pose threats to the demand of the regular
individual to embody the national universal around which everything else
revolves. This is the resistible strain of fundamentalism residing within the drive
to truth in identity.
The need for specification through internal and external difference is not
eliminable from any modern identity or morality. But the terms by which such
specification is achieved are always in need of critical interrogation. A culture
of pluralization interrogates contending drives to intrinsic identity. It does so,
first, by respecting the productive role of disruption and disturbance in politics,
whereby congealed identities are pressed to come to terms with elements of
historical contingency, uncertainty and difference in themselves; second, by
honoring a role for genealogy and political disturbance in cultural life, as
historical elements of artifice, power and chance in established unities are
exposed through these intellectual strategies; third, by cultivation of critical
responsiveness to new movements of pluralization proceeding from old injuries,
differences and energies; and, fourth, by participating in coalitional assemblages
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that install the economic and political conditions of forbearance and generosity
in relations between contending, interdependent identities.
How does the politics of pluralization proceed? It is precarious and paradoxi-
cal in form. Political enactment of a new identity out of existing energies,
differences and injuries embodies a drive by the insurgent force to attain a
positive standing even before its positive identity has crystallized fully; and it
calls upon established identities disturbed by this very movement to forebear
from automatically reiterating fixed standards that return it to an obscure or
degraded place. A culture of pluralization cultivates an ethos of forbearance in
political initiatives and of critical responsiveness to new movements. Critical
responsiveness itself embodies a delicate combination: its bearers respond
affirmatively to new drives to pluralization while resisting tendencies in each to
become a new, exclusive orthodoxy. Most of the time, the accent is properly on
the first gesture. For, as we have seen, a new drive by a culturally depreciated
constituency to reform the recognition it receives also issues a disturbing call to
other constituencies to redefine recognition of themselves.
Eventually, an ethos of critical responsiveness encourages an enlarged set of
cultural identities to appreciate more profoundly, and sometimes to come to love,
the (contestable) element of social construction in what they are, the profound
dependence they have on those differences that endow them with specificity, and
the deep contestability of the cultural assumptions that vindicate what they are
(e.g. as Christians, Jews, Kantians, Muslim, atheists, masculine, feminine, etc.,
etc., etc.). These developments, in turn, enrich the ethical sources from which
generosity in relations between alternative constituencies can emerge. The
interaction between such constituencies reveals the indispensability of ethics to
social life, the multiplicity of possible ethical sources, and the incorrigible
fragility of ethics. The pluralized ' we' s' now enhance their experiences
of interdependency with the interior, internal and external differences they
are measured against. New possibilities of political intersection with alter-
constituencies become available by lifting a little higher those anchors of identity
that never sank all the way to the ocean floor anyway. In such a pluralized
culture many may find themselves at different times on the initiating side, the
receptive side and ambiguous middle of the politics of enactment by which
something new is brought into being.
An ethos of critical responsiveness opens up possibilities of negotiation across
differences as it also expands the available range of diversity. It is the latter
collaborative effect so many arboreal critics of rhizomatic pluralism overlook.
They persist in concluding that the reciprocal recognition of hybrid origins and
the element of historical contingency in what they are by an expanding network
of constituencies automatically means social fragmentation and loss of the
political capacity for action in concert through the state. Perhaps this insistence
flows from the residual sacred/secular assumption that morality itself must rest
upon a solid ground, identity, rationality or contractual agreement rather than
reside in multiple intersections between interdependent identities, each of which
acknowledges elements of contestability in the source it admires the most. In
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fact, the opposite effect is more often the case: the relentless pursuit of unity in
meaning or identity fosters the very violence and fragmentation Unitarians
purport to fear the most. For each concerted campaign to own the center issues
in a contending set of drives to occupy it. The break-up of the former Yugoslavia
is not due to the 'proliferation of difference' but to war between contending and
exclusive identities each of which is bent upon effacing its own contingencies
and uncertainty. The Tocquevillian/American war on Amerindians flows from a
closed conception of civilization. The 'cultural war' registered by William
Bennett reflects an overweaning drive to retain the national-moral center by a
constituency that has in fact become a minority among other minorities.
The politics of enactment is that politics by which a movement forged from
differential injuries and energies struggles to place a new candidate on the
cultural field of legitimate identities. The most ethically revealing political
moment occurs when such a movement teeters on that perilous line, when it
resists previous definitions of what it is without yet moving its own members
and/or alter-identities far enough to institutionalize itself in a new way. This is
the moment when it is highly vulnerable to recolonization by the devaluations
it struggles against.
Numerous recent and current instantiations of such a moment are discernible.
As when those who claim the right to medically assisted death when terminally
ill press against the traditional Christian view that 'suicide' is always a sin and
the insistence lingering in some corners of secularism that death must wait until
nature wills it. Or when sexual minorities struggle against the compulsory
heterosexuality lodged in traditional Christian conceptions of sex and secular
medicalization of the hetero/homosexual pair to pluralize the cultural possibili-
ties of positive sexual identity. Or when a former 'traditional culture' or 'minor
nationality' presents itself as an ethnic group in a pluralistic culture. Or when
citizens of a state risk charges of treason or irresponsibility to the 'nation' by
participating in non-statist, cross national political movements to modify state
and interstate priorities in the domains of ecology, national security, sexual
rights, racial diversity, refugees, state policies of torture, state terrorism, and so
on. Or when devotees of nontheistic, post-secular reverence for the abundance
of life over the organization of identity strive to pry open ethical space between
the conventional distinction between sacred and secular moralities.
Each of these movements, if and when its carriers concede space to others on
the same field, is a drive to cultural diversification. Each is precarious at a
critical moment, partly because the definitions it resists might be re-inscribed
upon it by regular identities in charge of media, education, military organizations
and legal judgment and partly because it has not yet settled into a definitive set
of positive aspirations. Each movement is thus doubly vulnerable to defeat
through compulsory reassertion of Christian/secular conceptions of death, the
sinfulness/abnormality of 'homosexuality', the civilizational necessity of a
national center, the necessity of state control over citizen politics, and the
(Christian) sacred/secular regulation of legitimate moral codes.
How, then, does justice function in the politics of pluralization? A successful
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movement to positive recognition migrates from an obscure, degraded, or
abnormal form subsisting below the threshold of justice to a positive identity
now recognized to have been discriminated against by the previous practice of
justice. The very economy of justice that recently formed a barrier to recognition
of the new constituency now becomes the vehicle for entitlement of a new,
positive identity. But this means that the politics of pluralization operates upon
an ambiguous practice of justice that is often an obstacle to it before becoming
a protection of it. Indeed, one crucial condition of the struggle against the
element of injustice in the economy of justice is the acknowledgement that
justice is never sufficient onto itself: the practice of justice, when we are lucky,
resides within a more general ethos of critical responsiveness to pluralization
that both exceeds its reach and enables it to modify itself in response to new
drives to pluralization.
22
Put another way, the practice of justice is both
indispensable to a pluralist culture and a barrier to the politics of pluralization
by which that culture reanimates itself.
Each new introduction thereby reveals retrospectively a set of contingent
closures in an historically contingent matrix of identity/difference relations that
persistently tends to congeal into a universal ground. And each new identity,
once consolidated, is likely to enter into a new set of historically contingent
settlements in need of future disturbance and rectification. If you anticipate, as
I do, that in a mobile, pluralist culture pressures toward the naturalization of
historically constructed identities return indefinitely, you may be driven to
conclude that the practice of justice as fairness requires a more fundamental
ethos of critical responsiveness to new lines of flight and new possibilities of
enactment. Sensing this, you now contend politically against strains of unde-
served suffering persistently inhabiting an established economy of morality and
justice, struggling against the forgetfulness and innocence among those sacred/
secular universalists who insist that neither you nor they can be moral unless a
code of morality is unambiguous and/or securely grounded. For, on the view
advanced here, morality and justice at their best are never entirely reducible to
a code nor securely anchored to a ground: the code circulates through an ethos
of critical responsiveness that enables and exceeds it.
Pluralizing the sacred/secular duopoly
Justice presupposes an ethos of critical responsiveness that exceeds it. Pluraliza-
tion requires an ethos of critical responsiveness to new drives to identity. But
how could critical responsiveness itself be grounded in a democratic culture that
displays appreciation for the constitutive tension between pluralism and plural-
ization? The uncertain historical possibility of cultures of critical responsiveness
is set first by the fortunate emergence of a modus vivendi between contending,
interdependent constituencies thrown together on the same territory. This histori-
cally contingent condition, if and when established, then opens a window of
opportunity for development of a more robust, spiritualized ethos.
A pluralizing culture cultivates responsiveness to the production of new
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identities, actively seeking to negotiate new patterns of co-existence and inter-
section between contending, interdependent constituencies. In doing so it opens
up the possibility of reciprocal appreciation of the large number and kind of
sources from which an admirable ethical sensibility might spring. Social move-
ments that disrupt the (Christian) sacred/secular divide as historically constituted
might, for instance, open up space through which care is cultivated for the
abundance of life (or differance\ or 'untruth', or 'the real', or 'alterity', or 'the
vague', or 'ontological difference', etc., etc.) over the organization of identity
and culture. Such a source is not entirely reducible to a code of rationality, the
dictates of commanding/designing/loving god, or a fixed set of human interests.
Fitting neatly neither into the command, contract, teleological nor pragmatic
traditions of morality such a source scrambles familiar sacred/secular options
while drawing selectively upon minority perspectives within each tradition.
(Hence, there is no claim to be 'new' here.) It shares with many voices in sacred
traditions the faith that every practice of identity, morality, rationality and justice
is inhabited by energies that enable and exceed it; and it shares with many voices
in the secular tradition a refusal to invest a commanding or designing god in
those forces. Hence it tempts spokesmodels on both sides of this line to define
it as relativistic, parasitic, nihilistic or anarchistic. Even Taylor cannot resist
dismissing 'half-baked neo-Nietzscheans' as he cautiously opens up cultural
space for other perspectives to be.
Carriers of post-secular care for the diversity of being contend that fugitive
differences and surplus energies circulating through officially defined Identities
and Differences provide crucial conditions of possibility for an ethos of critical
responsiveness while persistently subverting attempts to find a certain, secure,
solid ground for morality. We do not obey a transcendental command or follow
a pragmatic maxim; we cultivate care for a protean diversity of being already
flowing through and around us to some degree or other. If and when that care
is absent it cannot be created by a stack of arguments. So, when asked why we
care in some ultimate sense, we respond by contesting the form of the question.
For we suspect the question to be governed by the imperative to find a final,
authoritative basis for morality: it thereby diverts attention from the cultivation
of care for the protean character of being by searching for authoritative sources
which command that care into being. In a world marked by the indispensability
and fragility of ethics we find nothing more fundamental than care for the
protean diversity of being. We cannot ensure, of course, that such a source will
always or often be enough. We are wary of efforts to provide such a guarantee.
The demand to 'secure' the ground of morality reminds us of those long
Christian campaigns of conquest and conversion against alien cultures. We thus
rethink the shape as well as the type of moral sources, translating quests to
secure a ground or pragmatic basis for morality into efforts to breathe more
generosity and responsiveness into the ethical atmosphere. Released from the
demand for a ground and/or a final answer to the (unanswerable) question 'Why
be moral?', we may be better able to appreciate and contend against the injustice
in justice itself.
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PLURALISM, MULTICULTURALISM AND THE NATION-STATE
To reverse effervescent forces circulating through the universal, the true, the
real, the nation and the regular individual, to be inspired by them because they
do not embody commands from a god, the dictates of rationality, a transcen-
dental subject, a national contract or a pragmatic consensus is to draw upon an
important source of forbearance in political initiatives and critical responsiveness
to the politics of pluralization.
23
Epicurus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Thoreau,
William James, Immanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Judith
Butler and Jacques Derrida all introduce significant variations of this theme into
ethical discourse. Several pursue a culture of pluralization with significant
resemblances to the version I have been sketching.
This post-nationalist vision of a pluralistic state is no more uncertain,
contestable or unreliable than those contending gods, contracts and rationalities
in the monotheistic and secular traditions. Indeed, it shares the elements of
uncertainty and unreliability with them. It is just that this perspective folds the
appreciation of persistent contestation and uncertainty into its very understanding
of the fugitive sources of ethics, its corresponding support of agonistic respect
between alternative ethico-political perspectives, and its cultivation of critical
responsiveness to new drives to identity.
24
Such a pluralization of the sacred/
secular moral duopoly diversifies culturally available sources of ethics and
extends the ethos of pluralism into new coiners. This pluralization of pluralism
exceeds the national homogeneity of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the national
pluralism of Alexis de Tocqueville, the mono-nationalism of William Bennett,
the multicultural nationalisms of Charles Taylor and the rhizomatic lines of flight
and connection of Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari. It does so by pursuing debts
and differences with each of these thinkers.
Certainly, the rhizomatic imagination of pluralism is unrealistic. Its introduc-
tion requires economic conditions of existence not addressed here.
25
And such a
multi-dimensional regulative ideal could never be realized fully at one time in
any specific place. There^ is always more to do, on one front or another, to
promote the ethos of pluralism. A prime value of such a political imagination is
that it provides the best position from which to name and contend against
numerous pressures to the fundamentalization of politics at the end of the
twentieth century.
Notes and references
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, two vols, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper &
Row, 1969), p. 292.
2. de Tocqueville, ibid, p. 292.
3. de Tocqueville, ibid, p. 327.
4. de Tocqueville, ibid, p. 373.
5. de Tocqueville, ibid, pp. 290-291.
6. de Tocqueville, ibid, p. 280.
7. William J. Bennett, The Devaluing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children (New York:
Touchstone Books, 1993), p. 207.
8. The portrait of American nationalism I am drawing has debts and affinities to the discussion of Australian
nationalism in Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People/Myths of State (Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1988). Kapferer calls the Australian type 'egalitarian nationalism', to capture the sense that all
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W. E. CONNOLLY
individuals are equal as members of the nation, though they may be unequal in the degree to which they
live up as individuals to the spirit of the nation.
9. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 6-7, 15. Emphasis added.
10. John Rawls, in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbian University Press, 1993) makes some
invaluable comments about the relation between an historical modus vivendi and the development of a
political ethic. These reflections, in a way, pour some Machiavellian salt on Rawlsian justice. Rawls thinks
that the historical compromise which occurred with the rise of the moden secular state out of religious
strife between Christian sects is the last one we need. But the historical time is right to seek another.
11. For an excellent elaboration of this position see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge,
1993).
12. Amy Guttmann, ed., Multiculturalism and 'The Politics of Recognition': An Essay by Charles Taylor with
Commentaries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 36.
13. Taylor, ibid, p. 58.
14. Taylor, ibid, p. 63.
15. Taylor, ibid, p. 67.
16. Charles Taylor is the Las Casas of the late twentieth century. Las Casas delivered a critical message to
Christian Spain in the sixteenth century after painfully coming to terms with the incredible violence
imposed by the Christian/conquistador conquest of the Aztecs. Once a highly respected priest, Las Casas
lost moral authority in his own church and country after repudiating the charges of idolatry against the
Aztecs and apportioning good and evil more evenly between the Christian faith from which he proceeded
and the unfamiliar faith of Montezume he approached. What does it signify that Taylor, a twentieth century
Christian, must reformulate this same message to Christian/secular faiths in the late twentieth century?
Does Taylor himself remain too centered in the very constellation that must be challenged and decentered
if multicultural pluralization is to have a chance? Tzvetan Todorov, in The Conquest of America: The
Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), explores shifts in the
thinking and fortunes of Las Casas. A reflection on Todorov's account of this historic encounter can be
found in Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press), ch. 2.
17. 'Thus while the law allows the American people to do everything: there are things which religion prevents
them from imagining and forbids them to become . . . Religion, which never intervenes directly in the
government of the American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political
institutions'. Democracy in America, p. 292. It is important to see that nationalists like Bennett think they
respect the separation of church and state. To them it means that a monotheistic culture sets the matrix
of morality, while the state refrains from publicly endorsing any particular sect within western monothe-
ism. The same goes with respect to the nationalism of regular individuals and race. Since any member of
any race is (thought to be) free to endorse all the components of national individualism, this drive to
assimilation is not thought to be racist.
18. The best history of the philosophical vicissitudes of secularism in its historic battles with Christianity of
which I am aware is provided by Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1983). Blumenberg argues against the 'secularization' hypothesis, the claim that secularism forgets
its intrinsic dependence upon a conception of the sacred to which it must return. He then endorses a
secularism appropriate to 'modernity'. I concur in Blumenberg's resistance to the theme of return but
dissent from his failure to consider complementarities between modern Christianity and secularism.
19. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 37. Rousseau
himself, of course, emphasizes his discontent with Christianity as a doctrine that subordinates the
organization of earthly life to preparation for the afterlife. But concentration upon this point conceals other
respects in which he carries this tradition forward.
20. Of course, Rousseau can be read against the grain in ways that emphasize the inability of each drive for
unity and authority to secure itself, and Rousseau himself might have intended this message to reach some
of his readers. I concur in such readings up to a point, as long as they do not imply that, because this is
the case, the Rousseauian pursuit of unity does not contribute to exclusion and violence. Sometimes, at
public lectures, when one resists the communitarian drive to unity, someone will respond that since the
drive to community is always 'deconstructed' by the attempts to achieve it, there is really not that much
to worry about. But there is plenty to worry about. The drive itself, as the Tocqueville example shows,
imposes incredible violence along the way.
21. The Christian god is often presented as a god of moral command and/or moral design, but, both within
and beyond these presentations, the god is also sometimes presented as the being which exceeds every
human reception of being, command, justice, morality, or purpose. To the extent the second god is given
priority over the first, conversations between Christian political theorists and post-Nietzscheans such as
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Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Irigaray improve. The first set of thinkers begins to recognize a crucial
part of themselves in the other, rather than reducing the other to nihilism or anarchism to suppress this
recognition.
22. I argue this thesis with specific reference to the Rawlsian theory of justice in 'Suffering, Justice and the
Politics of Becoming', Medicine, Culture and Society, forthcoming, 1996.
23. Charles Taylor, to whom I am indebted on this point, also replaces the theme of the ground of morality
with that of moral sources. He knows that a source is never encountered directly; it is always moved by
the very articulations that draw it into being. Taylor seems to leave formal space open for some to cultivate
nontheistic, post-secular moral sources, but he is also a little tone deaf to those like Derrida, Foucault and
others who have already followed this trail. See Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
24. By 'agonistic respect' I mean a relation of respect and forbearance between contending perspectives
embodying appreciation by each side of the contestable character of the presumptions that vindicate it.
Agonistic respect is an ideal relation to pursue between two contending perspectives that both have a
definite foothold in the established culture. This theme is developed in Identity/Difference. Critical
responsiveness, on the other hand, is a receptive orientation by a powerful constituency to an identity in
motion that presses to reconstitute its recognition by challenging the necessity of its current constitution.
It is a critical responsiveness because, for instance, sometimes the drive to a new cultural identity seeks
to universalize what it is or sometimes its very formation rests upon the imposition of serious suffering.
25. I address this issue in ch. 3 of The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1995). The first point to make here is that even if the economic conditions were established that would
not guarantee a culture of pluralization. These are joint, interdependent conditions. The second point is
more controversial: but I also contend that a state in which rhizomatic pluralism is developed is also one
most favourable to the formation of majority assemblages in support of the economic conditions of
pluralism.
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