(Download) "Cultural Claims and the Limits of Liberal Democracy (Critical Essay)" by Social Theory and Practice ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Cultural Claims and the Limits of Liberal Democracy (Critical Essay)
- Author : Social Theory and Practice
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 243 KB
Description
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson's theory of deliberative democracy has been widely influential and the focus of much attention among liberal democracy theorists in recent years. (1) This conception of democracy has been favorably viewed by many as a successful attempt to combine procedural and substantive aspects of democracy, while remaining quintessentially liberal. (2) Although their theory of deliberative democracy has been subject to intense scrutiny, (3) the theory's implications for multiculturalism have been largely ignored. In this paper, I attempt to fill this gap by carefully examining Gutmann's position on minority claims of culture, which is entailed by Gutmann and Thompson's theory of deliberative democracy. (4) Although Gutmann allows certain accommodations of cultural claims by immigrants, she is adamant in her rejection of cultural claims made by national minorities (5) whose cultures (6) are by and large nonliberal. (7) By showing that Gutmann's position does not do justice to legitimate claims of culture made by national minorities, I shall argue that Gutmann and Thompson's deliberative democracy itself is inadequate for radically pluralistic societies that house nonliberal national minorities. In what follows, I shall begin with an overview of Gutmann and Thompson's deliberative democracy, which upholds substantive values of "equal freedom and civic equality," and then show how Gutmann's multicultural proposal follows from it. I shall elaborate on Gutmann's reasons for rejecting nonliberal minority cultural claims, and focus, in particular, on her assertion that the conception of minority culture as "comprehensive," on which cultural claims are predicated, necessarily entails oppression of vulnerable cultural members, such as women. I shall then consider a seemingly puzzling position of some minority women who defend cultural claims, despite their subjugated status in their cultures. While these women's position may seem unreasonable from the liberal perspective, I shall argue that their position can be rendered philosophically defensible, if reconstructed on conceptions of nonliberal culture and persons that are different from the prevailing liberal conceptions. In this reconstruction, I shall show that the cultural insider's perspective has primacy in judgments about culture. By adopting the insider's perspective on minority culture, I shall indicate the ways in which Gutmann's position on cultural claims and sexist minority practices/norms is untenable. I shall conclude that the failure of Gutmann's position concerning cultural claims indicates that Gutmann and Thompson's deliberative democracy, on which the former is based, is too substantively liberal to serve as an ideal model of democracy in radically pluralistic societies into which some nonliberal minority cultures have been forcibly incorporated.
 "Cultural Claims and the Limits of Liberal Democracy (Critical Essay)" by Social Theory and Practice ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}