From Multiculturalism to Nationalism

Political Theory

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 33-45

  Birnbaum, Pierre ^a  

^a SORBONNE UNIVERSITÉ   (France)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84997868307     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591796024001003     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Telos (Summer 1994): 15, 29, 192, 195.
2. See, on this meeting, Krisis (June 1994). At the end of his article, “Communitarians and Liberals,” de Benoist writes, “The foundation of their [the communitarians'] message is that if one cannot recover life for organic communities organized around the idea of a common good and shared values, society will have no other choices by authoritarianism or disintegration” (p. 19).
3. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
4. Le Monde, May 14, 1995, 7.
5. On the ironic reception of these theories in France, see Marie-Christine Granjon, “Looking on the Bias: French Attitudes and American Multiculturalism (1990–1993),” XXième siècle (September 1991): 18–29.
6. See the strenuous critique of this issue in Habermas in Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
7. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, 39.
8. Daniel Weinstock has called attention to Taylor's opposition to the “requirement of liberal neutrality.” See his “The Political Theory of Strong Evaluation,” Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question, ed. by James Tully (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 178.
9. See S. Caney, “Liberalism and Communitarianism: A Misconceived Debate,” Political Studies 40, no. 2 (June 1992): 273–89.
10. Charles Taylor, “Quel principle d'identité collective?” L'Europe au soir du siècle, ed. by J. Lenoble and N. Dewandre (Paris: Esprit, 1993), 61, 67.
11. Taylor, Politics of Recognition, 31. See also p. 72.
12. Charles Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism, ed. by Guy LaForest (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 136–38.
13. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 375–77, 415–18, 420, 415.
14. See also his The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 28.
15. Johann Gottfried Herder, Idées sur la philosophie de l'histoire de l'humanité (Paris: Agora, 1991), 48, 50, 96.
16. Johann Gottfried Herder, Une autre philosophie de l'histoire (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1978), 185.
17. Louis Dumont, L'idéologie allemande: France-Allemagne et retour (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).
18. The link of Herder, Berlin, and Taylor is fundamental. As Berlin emphasizes, “Charles Taylor and I share our evaluation of Herder's central idea that to belong to society is an intrinsic human need, that the self-realization cannot be obtained in isolation from social life but only in the framework of, for Taylor much more than me, the organic structure of the culture or society in which they are born and to which therefore they cannot help belong. At this point, we part ways, I think. I do not believe in teleology…. I think that Taylor believes in essence, whereas I do not” (“Introduction,” Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, 2).
19. Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), 350.
20. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: Murray, 1990), 76, 81, 87.
21. Dumont, L'idéologie allemande, 25.
22. Guy LaForest, “Introduction,” Reconciling the Solitudes, xv.
23. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 62–68, 142–43, 145.
24. Taylor, “Articulation and Re-articulation,” Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, 254, 256, 199.
25. (Editor's note: The Meech Lake accords proposed an expansion of provincial powers, an expansion of autonomy, and greater possibility for provinces to opt out of various federal programs. It would have written Canadian duality into the constitution by a recognition of la nation Canadienne-Francaise. In part from the pressure of those favoring independence, Québec did not ratify the accords and they never became law. Taylor was in favor of them. See his Reconciling the Solitudes, 170ff.)
26. Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes, 176–77;
27. “The Politics of Recognition,” 58–59.
28. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 13, 55.
29. For a critique, see Ayse Ceyhan, “Le communitarisme et la question de reconnaissance,” Cultures et Conflits (Winter 1993).
30. Michael Ignatieff criticizes “Québecois nationalism” and writes, “Many, if not all, Québecois anglopohones feel that the language legislation which banishes English from the public sphere and confines it to the private makes them second class citizens” (“Québec: La socièté distincte, jusqu'où?” Le déchirement des nations, ed. by Jacques Rupnik [Paris: Seuil, 1995], 152). Paradoxically, these are the very terms that Taylor uses when he hopes that the politics of recognition will avoid the development of “second-class citizens.”
31. See the critiques of Taylor by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “The Hidden Politics of Cultural Identification,” Political Theory (February 1994): 152–66
32. and by Thomas Dumm, “Strangers and Liberals,” Political Theory (February 1994): 167–75.
33. For Claude Galipeau, Berlin “confuses epistemological relativism with moral relativism and asserts that if the former is untrue [then] so is the latter” (Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 63).
34. See Jean Leca, “Types de pluralisme et la viabilité de la démocratie,” Papers of the XVIth World Congress of the IPSA (Berlin, 1994), 17.
35. Also in critique of Taylor, Yael Tamir seeks to imagine a “liberal nationalism which leaves to the actor a large margin of choice of his own values such that he may preserve, in the midst of nationalism, the word liberal which is refused to him by the communitarians” (Liberal Nationalism [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993], 23). Tamir notes that “a national culture is not a prison” and by this comes closer to Renan than to Herder (see pp. 33–37 and 889). Tamir even thinks that nationalism should be pluralist. In his eyes, “individuals have a choice. They can refuse to speak the language of their community, reject its culture and assimilate themselves to another culture” (p. 88). For him, it is not a matter of having a State correspond to each nation. If “a political system reflects a particular national culture, its citizens will be free to follow different cultures and to respect the conceptions of the good.” Tamir prefers to return to the traditional pluralist model of consociational democracy as described by A. Lipjhart and symbolized in the multiplicity of cleavages, where the consensus of elites fashions by itself the only idea of the common interest (pp. 156ff). For once, classical political sociology allows a more empirical way of setting normative questions.
36. Stuart Hampshire, “Nationalism,” Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, ed. by Edna Margalit and Avishai Margalit (London: Hogarth, 1991), 127–34. Without relying on a completely convincing demonstration, John Gray judges, to the contrary, that Berlin's nationalism is limited by his adherence to a fundamental internal pluralism. If Berlin is favorable to pluralism, he makes no explicit reference to it in his texts on nationalism.
37. See John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 99–121.
38. See also Steven Lukes, “The Singular and the Plural: On the Distinctive Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin,” Social Research (Fall 1991): 687–715.
39. Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 159.
40. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Nationalism,” New York Review of Books, November 21, 1991.
41. A. Oldfield, Citizenship and Community (London: Routledge, 1990).
42. On this matter, see Matteo Gianni. “Les liens entre citoyenneté et démocratie sur la base du débat 'Libéraux-Communitariens” (Etudes de recherches, 1994, no. 26, Université de Genève, Département de science politique).
43. On the ideas of weak and strong, see Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum, Sociology of the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
44. On their consequences, see Pierre Birnbaum, State and Collective Action: The European Experience (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
45. Michael Walzer, quite rightly, makes himself the partisan of a more open multiculturalism. For him, “this American civil society is wonderfully multitudinous…. This country is not only a pluralism of groups but also a pluralism of individual. It is perhaps the most individualist society in human society….There are no borders around our cultural groups and, of course, no border police” (“Multiculturalism and Individualism,” Dissent [Spring 1994]: 187, 191).
46. See also his Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).