Understanding pluralism

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 8, Issue 4, 1997, Pages

  Sartori, Giovanni ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 18744426430     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.1997.0064     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. The classic works on toleration are Milton's Areopagitica (1644), Locke's Epistola de Tolerantia (1689), and Voltaire's Traité sur la tolérance (1763). Three recent interconnected symposia are: John Horton and Susan Mendus, eds., Aspects of Toleration (London: Methuen, 1985); David Edwards and Susan Mendus, eds., On Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); and Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
2. The classic works on toleration are Milton's Areopagitica (1644), Locke's Epistola de Tolerantia (1689), and Voltaire's Traité sur la tolérance (1763). Three recent interconnected symposia are: John Horton and Susan Mendus, eds., Aspects of Toleration (London: Methuen, 1985); David Edwards and Susan Mendus, eds., On Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); and Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
3. The classic works on toleration are Milton's Areopagitica (1644), Locke's Epistola de Tolerantia (1689), and Voltaire's Traité sur la tolérance (1763). Three recent interconnected symposia are: John Horton and Susan Mendus, eds., Aspects of Toleration (London: Methuen, 1985); David Edwards and Susan Mendus, eds., On Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); and Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
4. The classic works on toleration are Milton's Areopagitica (1644), Locke's Epistola de Tolerantia (1689), and Voltaire's Traité sur la tolérance (1763). Three recent interconnected symposia are: John Horton and Susan Mendus, eds., Aspects of Toleration (London: Methuen, 1985); David Edwards and Susan Mendus, eds., On Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); and Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
5. The classic works on toleration are Milton's Areopagitica (1644), Locke's Epistola de Tolerantia (1689), and Voltaire's Traité sur la tolérance (1763). Three recent interconnected symposia are: John Horton and Susan Mendus, eds., Aspects of Toleration (London: Methuen, 1985); David Edwards and Susan Mendus, eds., On Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); and Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
6. Edmund Burke, Works, 9 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1839), 1:425-26.
7. I draw here from my book Parties and Party Systems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 3-13.
8. For a succinct account, see John Gunnell, "The Genealogy of American Pluralism: From Madison to Behavioralism," International Political Science Review 17 (July 1996): 253-65. My point is directed not at the quality of the literature in question (which is very good), but at how little in it is distinctively pluralistic.
9. See for all, L. Kuper and M.G. Smith, eds., Pluralism in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
10. For an overview, see Susan Solomon, ed., Pluralism in the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin's, 1983). have criticized Soviet studies, in this and other respects, in "Totalitarianism, Model Mania and Learning from Error," Journal of Theoretical Politics 5 (January 1993): 5-22.
11. For an overview, see Susan Solomon, ed., Pluralism in the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin's, 1983). have criticized Soviet studies, in this and other respects, in "Totalitarianism, Model Mania and Learning from Error," Journal of Theoretical Politics 5 (January 1993): 5-22.
12. See, for example, Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). It can be conceded, of course, that pluralism involves "recognition," as Charles Taylor has argued, but this implies mutual recognition. Instead, the so-called politics of recognition conceals a very ugly politics of dis-cognition, of disowning and disparaging cognition. The battle cry raised against "dead white male" canonical authors is a monocultural project of shocking intellectual poverty.
13. Sheldon Wolin, "Democracy, Difference and Re-Cognition," Political Theory 21 (August 1993): 467.
14. See, for an underpinning, chapter 6 of my book The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1987), esp. 131-37.
15. J.R. Lucas, The Principles of Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 296-301.
16. On parallel grounds, John Rawls draws a distinction between "reasonable pluralism" and "pluralism as such" and upholds the former, arguing that a liberal-democratic society is based on a set of universal "points of view" that command the loyalties of all. See Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 36-39. I concur with the substantive point, but in my argument pluralism as such is (must be) "reasonable." If not, pluralism is a misnomer.
17. See George Graham, "Consensus," in Giovanni Sartori, ed., Social Science Concepts (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1984), passim.
18. John Ladd, in Carl J. Friedrich, ed., Community (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959), 277.
19. Indeed, multiculturalism may well succeed in breaking up the American nation. As Arthur Schlesinger puts it, "America increasingly sees itself as composed of groups more or less ineradicable in their ethnic character." The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 16.